It is impossible to imagine a business that can thrive without good infrastructure. This is particularly true for businesses of the Internet economy because they need to be built on a platform that can deliver the original vision. For a startup, the infrastructure choices made in the early days have a lasting impact. Do you go for a hosting platform where you give up creative control but gain the promise of super-scalability? Or do you ensure you know your platform in detail by rolling out and maintaining your own hardware and software stacks? With the advent of cloud computing and recent trends toward hybrid hosting models, the choices and questions are growing each day.

Join us for breakfast on Dec. 3 as we bring together experts from the world of web infrastructure and ask them to outline the best options for startups. We will discuss future trends of platforms and new options for startups as the concepts behind hosting evolve into more niche infrastructure-on-demand services. This session is for entrepreneurs, technologists and developers in the web arena who want to know which direction web infrastructure is taking next. The event is sponsored by PEER 1.

Register now for your free ticket here. Limited availability.

Moderator:
Om Malik — founder, GigaOM

Speakers:
Jason Hoffman, CTO, Joyent
Byron Sebastian, CEO, Heroku
Sebastian Stadil, founder, Scalr
Robert Miggins, SVP, Serverbeach
Tom Mornini, CTO and co-founder, EngineYard

Event Details:
Date: Dec. 3, 2009
Time: 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Breakfast and networking start at 9 a.m.
Cost: Free
Registration: http://infrastructure.eventbrite.com/
Venue location: GigaOM HQ, 217 2nd Street, Floor 4, San Francisco, CA 94105

I had breakfast this morning with my friend Ben Lerer.  He, and his dad Ken Lerer, have recently put together a seed fund to make angel investments in early stage consumer companies.  He asked me a question, which two years ago, I would have been able to answer in a heartbeat, but today caused me a moment of pause.  He asked me what companies are on Twitteresque growth trajectories that would be worth investing in regardless of price.  The reason I paused was because working at a venture capital firm for a few years, you get to a point where your thinking is probably 6-12 months ahead of the curve.  But lacking thousands of data points on blazing markets and the companies within them, I have probably lost that 6-12 month advantage.  I still read a ton, and spend time with smart folks from the entrepreneurial and VC communities, but the fire hose of information isn’t quite as fat.

Part of the job of an Associate at a venture capital firm is to identify new and emerging spaces that are worth investing ahead of, and exposing those opportunities to the partnership.  Microblogging in 2007 was one of those spaces.  To this day, Joel Cutler (who happens to be absolutely brilliant) at General Catalyst will tell you he owes me “a good drink of wine” for passing when I insisted we should fight to bet on Twitter, despite what seemed like a hefty price tag in the first venture round that Union Square Ventures ended up leading (the round got done at a $20M valuation, and two years later Twitter was just valued at $1 Billion).

That’s sort of the nature of being a junior guy at a venture firm.  Because you have less responsibility with the existing portfolio, you are able to spend more time than the old guys taking in new data and expanding the firm’s thinking into untouched markets.  You develop theses around that data, and when you find something you truly believe in, you need to pound the table so that the Partners who have not spent the last 3 months learning this new space with you will listen and understand the opportunity.  Even still, there is a very good chance that nobody will be willing to use one of their bullets on your idea.  Each partner at a venture firm gets to make 3 or 4 bets a year (might vary a bit from firm to firm depending on size of fund and number of partners), and a firm probably looks at 2,000-5,000 deals a year.  Passing on winners is part of the business.  Bessemer actually has a great page on their site where they display the firm’s Antiportfolio.  The Antiportfolio is a list of all the massively successful companies they could have invested in, but didn’t.  A star studded list of billion dollar logos is accompanied by hubristic quotes from the “passing partners,” explaining why they would never invest in the likes of Ebay, Apple, Google, Intel, Paypal, etc…

So in the absence of an immediate answer to Ben’s question, I can perhaps supply a recipe for any early stage investor who is trying to get ahead of the curve.  This is my process for finding the next Twitter:

1) Read: Macro (i.e. Economist) and micro (vertical blogs) content ingestion (30%)

2) Try: Personally experience as many products and services as possible in markets of interest, identify game changers (15%)

3) Experts: Develop and test theses with thought leaders from industry and academia (15%)

4) Entrepreneurs: Speak/meet with every entrepreneur attacking a given market, identify current state of the market and who is best positioned to capitalize on sea changes and future direction (40%)

5) Repeat steps 1-3 over time and across markets

Oh, and if you’re the next Twitter, and investors haven’t found you…you can email me, I’ll try to put you in touch with the right folks…

Billerica, Massachusetts -based Nexx Systems, a maker of equipment used in the metallization and packaging of silicon wafers used in both electronics and photovoltaic (solar) applications, has raised $4 Million in a Series D equity round involving Enterprise Partners Venture Capital and Sigma Partners.

Nashua, New Hampshire’s Autovirt, a Data Migration and management company, adds $5 Million in a Series A add-on involving Kepha Partners and Sigma Partners.

I was asked to answer a few questions at a talk I gave last week at the Nationwide Networking Event. It was aimed at Small businesses with the topic about new media and the advantages of being small. I thought it was a nice snippet of ideas worth sharing here.

Q: What type of changes can we expect from media in 2010 and how do we need to prepare for it as business professionals?

A: Media will fragment further, it’s increasingly like fashion with new ideas appearing daily. The art of value, like with fashion is by going with the classics and choosing the right style for the brand you want to build. Match your environment, by being involved in the right channels.

Q: Where do you see the role of the blog in the future?

A: Increasingly important. Blogs are a trusted source, because bloggers become, or are an expert on their topic of choice. This is because all good blogs are topic specific. And people want to deal with experts.

Q: What can we expect from the evolution of twitter and our capacity to use it as a marketing medium?

A: If we use it as a marketing medium we’ve already lost. It’s a conversation…. Conversation can turn into business, but it is primarily a conversation. First we need to be a resource. A resource to others, from which we can build trust and valued relationships. These may eventually lead a business relationship.

Q: What trends are coming from America that we need to be aware of?

A: Trends are global now. We don’t have to look overseas to see it. Things arrive simultaneously. It’s not like it was 20 years ago where our friends return from sojourns overseas to tell us all about the cool things they saw, and we have to wait for them to appear in our market a few years later. Now it’s on our desktop the day it happens. This is been further facilitated by web tools such as Springwise, Twitter and Youtube.

Q: How do we (small business people) benefit from the changes in the media landscape?

A: Barriers to entry have been removed so anyone can play. But it requires a long term consistent effort. New media requires a low financial investment, and large human capital input. Where as old media requires a large financial investment with little human effort. At least now we have to choice. In addition large companies have been (so far) pretty bad at using new media. It creates an advantage for us.

Q: How can we better utilize technology tor reduce our costs and increase our profits?

A: Shift from being doers, to becoming project managers. Outsource where ever possible. It’s easier now with all the tools we have at our disposal like elance and skype. Why do we even need an office? Is it because we need to, or because we don’t trust the people we work with?

Q: Your blog has 50,000 readers a month, how did you do that?

A: Two simple things. One blog entry every day. Staying on topic (entrepreneurship / startups). Then wordpress and Google did the rest. It’s not a trick, it just takes consistent effort.

Q: What is the meaning of micro brand building and how would it be relevant to soloprenuers?

A: Build your personal brand first. That’s the first part of micro branding, becoming known for something. Having a skill you can share with others. Then eventually cross fertilize to your business brand.

Q: What are the simplest things we can do to build a micro brand?

A: Have a tight focus area of interest. Share our lessons honestly and openly. Frequency of output.

Q: How do we protect our brands?

A: Not with IP and legal stuff…. Most of that is a simple waste of money.  We protect it with customers, innovation and reliability.

Q: What one piece of advice would you give to those of us that need clients and need them quickly?

A: Cold call. Not on the phone, but turn up and talk.

Q: What books have influenced  you?

The Cluetrain Manifesto

The Purple Cow

The art of the start

22 Laws of marketing

Q: What marketers / speakers have influenced you?

A: Steven Wright (comedian) he taught me how to flip my perspective for alternative solutions.

While watching Eddie Murphy on Inside The Actors Studio Interview – he said some amazing things which I thought were great for entrepreneurs. When asked by the audience what advice he’d give to any aspiring actors this is what he said:

The advice I would give an actor is not to take any advice from anyone. Because I remember when I was younger, I would ask for advice… because with actors when you make that choice, you know it deep down, and you know in your heart, you know what you wanna do and you know what your abilities are and lots of time advice could screw you up. A great advice story was from Rodney Dangerfield. I did the comic strip in Fort Lauder Dale when I was like 16 or 17 years old and Dangerfield walks in. And the whole room was ‘Oh Dangerfield is here’ – everyone bumped all the comics and no one wanted to go up cause Dangerfield was in the room. And I was so confident back then I was like Mr Dangerfield, I want you to watch my show… I want you to watch.. He said, Oh yeh, I’ll stick around kid. And he watches. And I did my thing, and I was really dirty (with my language) and after the show, he said… ‘Hey kid, you said a lot of bad things there, hey watch your language”. He gave me a big speech about my language and the words I was using, and it really took the wind out of my sails, and I was like WOW, cause I really killed that night…

Then 5 or 6 years later, I’m at the bathroom at Caesars Palace, and Dangerfield comes in and he’s in the urinal right next to me, and I haven’t seen him since that night. I look over and he looks back and said: “Hey, who knew?”

Startup Blog would love to know what advice have you ignored to advantage?

I don’t agree with Vivek Wadhwa that losing a business plan competition is better than winning it. However, I do think that business plan competitions force many teams to aim for the wrong target. Here is the comment I left on the TechCrunch post:

Flipkart is an ecommerce website which sells books in India. It was setup in Sept 2007 and it has over 400,000 titles with a whopping 5 million monthly uniques, and a new round of cash from Accel in the bank.

If you are an avid book reader there is a good chance that you have heard about or bought some book from Flipkart. I have used a few of the other websites and without any doubt Flipkart is the best in this league of booksellers.

Why is Flipkart the best?

The most important feature for the websites in this business is ‘Search’. It should be quick and accurate.This is one of the reasons why Flipkart is so successful in comparison with other book sellers. Except for Flipkart and TheStorez all the other websites fail in this vital area, as they either take long time to return search results or have some connection problems in due time. Once I search my book, the next thing is ‘how easy it is to read the description, previews and buy the book?’. Even here Flipkart scores above all the other websites with easily noticeable links like ‘Add to Cart’ and a single click to the check-out page. Also, Flipkart integrated Google Books preview which facilitates you to read a few pages from the book.

The Indian Consumers: Earn their trust

Understandably, the Indian Consumer is not very comfortable in buying online, not even a handkerchief. The Indian Consumer is very cautious about spending money online due to a mix of reasons like

1. Lack of Trust:

If a person is cheated in an online buying, he spreads a message saying ‘Don’t buy online’, which affects your business too even though the problem is with your competitor.

Most of the websites throw ‘Server Error’, ‘Application Error’ and all sorts of application problems without a proper message. This not only irritates the customer but he loses the trust on your website and might never come again. If you don’t serve your customers well, somebody else will.

2. Pricing:

With many competitors and the second-hand book stalls which always have the best-sellers outside, pricing is a very vital aspect in this business. Be honest with your pricing, don’t change the price too much in the process of check-out. It makes the customer feel that you are not honest and he immediately loses trust on the website.

3. Unkept Promises:

Most websites boast of money back guarantees and exchange facilities which are not properly implemented.

4. Payment Mechanism:

A small survey done by me among a group of 14 people taught me that people like to buy small when they buy online. Some of the first timers told me that they don’t mind buying online if the book is cheap, but the problem is some of the websites ask for a minimum bill of hundred rupees and don’t ship free. This is where we can target the first-timers and gain their trust and emotional value.

5. Wrong User Interface:

I observe that most of the websites display a category of books like photography, fiction etc… I don’t know the rationale behind this but this is going to be easy for your customers. Most people easily remember titles,  and authors and this why you should present them with titles, authors, and categories with an excellent ‘Search’.

6. What You Show Is Not What You Deliver:

Most of the websites sell duplicate products and the customer has no way to go back. Almost all of my friends have complained about this at some point or the other. However, in the books business there is very less to be deceived, unless you get a pirated copy or the wrong title.

Marketing Strategy:

Have Customer Care Centers:

Take the case of the Crossword store at the end of the street. The advantage these stores have is they serve as customer care centers, in case if the customer has some problems while using their free home delivery, or phone a book facilities. This is not something the esellers have which makes it more difficult to gain the trust of the customer. So, you should be really good at your delivery service and make the customer say ‘Vow!!’, and one such example is Zappos.

Use of Viral Marketing:

Reduce the cost of some low price best-sellers and use the social networks like Facebook to promote your offers. This is a golden oppurtunity for you to prove that you deliver the promises and gain the customers’ trust. Also, gifts and group accounts can lead to some traffic when implemented in the right season.

On November 5th, almost exactly 3 weeks ago, 253 people read my first blog post.  On November 25, 2 days ago, 4,730 people showed up.  While I am excited by the growth, I am still searching for better ways to harness the collective knowledge within this new community.    Despite more than 5,000 people reading the last post, only 8 decided to comment and continue the line of thinking.  Less than 2/10 of a percent participation is not very good.

Today, I want to experiment with a new concept.  I’d like to take a page from the open source software movement, and apply that spirit to the creation of a VP of Marketing Job Spec.  For those not familiar, the theory behind open source software development is that much of the coding effort required to carry out development of a project overlaps with the effort required to build other similar (or not so similar) products.  By openly sharing a body of code with everyone in a given community, all members within it are able to leverage what has already been accomplished/created, instead of reinventing the wheel from scratch.  So if I’m building an e-commerce site and I want to include a shopping cart function, I could spend hours developing my own from scratch, or I could just plug in an open source module that another developer wrote, knowing that his code will do the trick.  With the time I saved, maybe I will figure out how to build a feature on top of his code that reduces drop off, and then, if I’m cool, I’ll publish the code behind my enhancement back to the community (open source developers, if I butchered this, please chime in).

So now that I have all of you smart people reading this blog, I figured we could draw on some of your collective knowledge in an effort to create the ideal Job Spec.  Whatever we create here, will hopefully be the result of years of experience and lessons learned by those who have hired well (and not so well).  My hope is that the document we create will enhance our hiring at JumpPost, but also that it will serve as a template from which any startup recruiting a VP of Marketing can build.

I will start with a brief description of what JumpPost is, and then work into what I think we need:

JumpPost is somewhere between an online classifieds site and a low cost online real estate broker.  So, if Craigslist and Redfin had a baby, it might look something like JumpPost.  From a customer acquisition perspective, we are focused on general population consumers who are psyched about saving/making money during a change of residence.  We’re not interested in reaching home owners (at least for now), and folks who live in cities are more exciting than suburbanites and rural dwellers.  It’s a pretty wide net we can cast, and some of our value propositions are unique (read: won’t be competitive to acquire certain types of users), while others are highly competitive.  In a VP of Marketing, we are looking for someone who has a play book for building a liquid online community through a series of paid and non-paid customer acquisition strategies.

I’d like to collect contributions to three lenses through which we can identify a star VP of Marketing:

1) General Personality traits: What type of person makes a great online/consumer marketer? ideas that might be right or wrong include:

- data driven thinker

- addiction to analytics

- detail oriented

- quantitative bent

- understanding of relationship between product development and marketing efforts

- what else?  What personality traits do the best marketers you know exhibit?  Any surprising ones? Any huge red flags that your bad marketing hires displayed?

2) Specific marketing skills and experience requirements:

A) What unique skills should this person possess? ideas include:

- fluency in Google Analytics

- proficiency with SEM keyword tools/models (i.e. Clickable)

- what else? (I actually don’t know what are best in class skills here)

B) What experiences and backgrounds best prepare someone for this type of gig? Ideas include:

- comes from an analogous market acquiring similar demo of user (in our case: online travel, online classifieds, online real estate, online jobs, marketplaces, etc…)

- managed SEM campaign of $XX million budget with XX level of success (what are the metrics to judge success here? What’s a good baseline to measure outperformance vs. underperformance?)

- designed and executed successful referral program alla Gilt.com, Jetsetter.com, etc…(again, what’s a good baseline for measuring outperformance vs. underperformance?)

-  fluency acquiring customers from within larger platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc…

- took an online consumer facing site from xx users to yy users in xx months (what’s best in class here, and how do we separate out the candidate’s contribution to that growth from all other efforts that played a hand?)

3) General traits and skills necessary for an early stage startup team member: What are the must haves and red flags when determining if a hire for any early role will be able to hack it in the beginning stages of  a company’s development? Ideas include:

- previous experience growing a company from alpha product to exit

- effusive and clear communicator

- “roll up your sleeves” attitude, no job is too small (not going to try to hire service providers to do all the work)

- comfort with a lack of structure and ability to create and execute own initiatives

- what else?  what are the best predictors that an early hire will be a star team member?

So, my suggestions are in no way exhaustive.  Please, those who have successfully and unsuccessfully hired an online VP of Marketing, rip this apart and share your experience in the comments of this post.  Where am I right on? What is way off?  Let’s try to fill these three buckets and I’ll publish a composite spec for all to build off of going forward.

Cambridge, Massachusetts -based MF Analytics, Ltd, a financial solutions provider for Microfinance and SME institutions, is acquired by TriLinc Global, LLC of Los Angeles, California. TriLinc Global is a social impact investment company. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Leostream, a Waltham, MA-based provider of application-management software for virtual desktop infrastructures, has raised $2 million in an equity financing, according to an SEC filing. VentureWire reports that Meakem-Becker Venture Capital, of Sedwickley, PA, provided Leostream with the $2 million capital infusion, which the company hopes will be enough to support its operations until it becomes profitable. Leostream raised $3 million in its Series A round of venture capital in 2008, also led by Meakem Becker Venture Capital.

Mike Janes, chief executive and co-founder of Palo Alto, Calif.-based FanSnap, a search engine for live event tickets, is no fan of the New York Yankees (he loves the Red Sox), but he was happy to see them in this fall’s World Series. Why? Since they were playing the Phillies, a rivalry as old as professional baseball itself, it boosted the number of people looking to buy tickets to the games, thus giving a bump to the number of people using his service. The company, which launched back in March, has just unveiled a new feature: Seat Alert, which notifies fans when the seats that meet their specific requirements are made available.

Thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday, this week I’ve been able to catch up with some of the companies I’ve written about in the past such as FanSnap. The company, which started out focusing on sports events, has since expanded to music concerts and Broadway shows, with its sales now evenly split between those related to sports and those not. FanSnap currently has 800 interactive maps that allow folks to pick and choose the live event tickets they want to buy. Yankees-Phillies games along with tours by musical acts such as U2 and Lady Gaga have revved up business for the company, Janes said.

FanSnap has about 200,000 unique visitors every month, he told me. “We continue to grow by focusing on our strategy to concentrate on hot events and hot venues.” Web analytics companies Quantcast and Compete put FanSnap’s number of uniques lower, but concur with the firm’s claims as to its growth. FanSnap has raised about $15.5 million in funding from General Catalyst Partners and Highland Capital.

After launching as a plain-vanilla search engine, the company has been trying to turn itself into what Janes likes to call the “Yelp of venues.” To that end, FanSnap has been asking its users to write reviews of their seats and upload photos of them in order to help out future buyers. The company has launched an iPhone app as well. “We want to become the single best source of information for fans,” said Janes, who was formerly chief marketing officer of StubHub.

It’s a great goal, but FanSnap clearly has its work cut out for it. It needs to improve its listings directory, for one. And it needs to redouble its efforts to get users to upload photos. I did quite a few random searches and ended up on numerous venues with no photos. Most importantly, it needs to quickly build interactive maps for some of the more popular venues — notably the Oakland Coliseum and the Angels Stadium.

About two years ago, I wrote about the growing number of download speed boosters, among them an Israeli company called SpeedBit. Well the 10-year-old Speedbit has been speeding along ever since, and last month saw its SpeedBit Video Accelerator pass the 20 million installs-mark. The company, which makes a handful of products, claims that it now delivers about 8 million files daily and has about 18.5 million active monthly users. I’d actually forgotten about SpeedBit, as I kept upgrading to faster connections so that I never had to think about download snarls. But generally speaking, bandwidth (and good connectivity) remains a problem, so folks are still turning to this service because they, too, want smooth video streams with little or no buffering stops.

It’s been only 2 weeks since we switched to paid subscription for MobileNoter, but we already have paying customers in hundreds of users. We plan to hit the “in thousands” milestone somewhere next year.

In addition to that, we released another product this week. Meet “My Office” – a service dedicated to independant consultants, who work for direct sale companies like Amway or Mary Kay. The service offers the consultants a simplified CRM, accounting, and personal schedule module. The service is in beta as of now, and it’s free. We plan to translate it into English and eventually other languages next year. We have two buttons on the site: Compliment and Complain. So far, people are clicking “Compliment” button much more than the “Complain” – this is a good sign!

I needed to write a few short pieces on some of the different management styles I have encountered in my corporate and professional travels. I want to define each of these management styles so that I can compare and contrast them, as well as serving as reference points for the longer articles on this topic which I am in the process of drafting.

I will begin with some of the “Letter Management Styles”, of which there are several. The purpose of this litany of alphabetic management styles is not to promote one over another; in fact, I don’t recommend adopting any of these naively. But nevertheless, many individual team members and managers will exhibit some behaviors from one of the above styles, and it is helpful to know what makes them tick. Finally, certain individuals may prefer to be managed as a Theory X or Theory Y type (Theory Z, which I will write about at a future date, is less likely in this case), and it is good to be able to recognize the signs. Moreover, some companies might be implicitly based on one style or another.

The first management style about which I will write is one which will be recognizable to every person, regardless of professional or personal background: “Theory X”.

Theory X is perhaps the oldest management style and is very closely related to the hierarchical, command-and-control model used by military organizations (of which I am intimately familiar).

One thing I can personnally attest to in regards to the Theory X management style is that it maintains the military organizations’ faith in the fact of the necessity of this approach, as (in the view of Theory X proponents) most people inherently dislike work and will avoid it if they can. Hence, in the Theory X management style, managers should coerce, control, direct, and threaten their workers in order to get the most out of them.

A statement that I recall from a conversation with a prototypical Theory X manager with whom I worked (in a prototypical Theory X organization) with was “people only do what you audit”.

zyakaira notess: Early mid year estimates had indicated $100 million for Zynga of “Farmville”, Texas Hold’em and Mafia Wars across facebook and myspace. Now this is likely to be revised up by a few percentage points for zynga alone…Now you know why Tweetmeme and Twitterfeed are so conjoined with  Twitter. Let’s hope this pans out ’socially’. Other animation/gaming players like Rock you and Zynga and Playdom all have $100m each in funding and by current engagement rates are likely to fare equally well for the PE involved in each case…long time to go before natural selection burns a few holes..

Even if the Virtual world envisaged with Dubai World comes to a nought, facebook and twitter are not doing so badly after all. Tweetmeme and Twitterfeed to name a few would have an even more significant overlap with the base ‘platform’ of twitter than the seemingly conjoined but really technology independent gaming networks and they are also on spinal tap.

<blockquote>

Facebook Games Maker Zynga To Make $100 Million This YearNicholas Carlson|May. 1, 2009, 3:12 PM |

Mark Pincuss social gaming startup Zynga, which makes multiplayer games like the popular Texas Holdem for social networks Facebook and MySpace, is growing faster than you think.We reported in January that it closed $50 million in sales during 2008. Now BusinessWeeks Sarah Lacy says the startup has “annual sales of about $100 million, according to several people close to the company.”Most of that money comes from “the 2% to 10% of users who pay $1 an hour to play premium games or buy virtual goods.”Sarah says the other hot startup in social gaming is Playdom, which generates about $50 million a year in sales.

via Facebook Games Maker Zynga To Make $100 Million This Year.

</blockquote>

Great talk by KPCB’s John Doerr about company cultures, KPCBs investments, Greentech and career advice.

There are essentially two types of cultures in companies

People are nostalgic for newspapers for a reason. The growing multitude of options for getting your daily news is more stressful than informative. We have on the one hand Google Reader, with its ever-growing mass of unread items, and on the other sites like NYTimes.com, which even as they get more customizable and webby are still limited to a small set of authors. But attempts to create a personalized news aggregator often require too much work on the part of users.

iCurrent, a personal information delivery service from entrepreneur Ramana Rao, formerly of Inxight Software and Xerox PARC, is trying to be smart but also easy. Funded to the tune of $3 million from Crosslink Capital, Rao said he’s deliberately kept South San Francisco, Calif.-based iCurrent under the radar. “We’re not scared or disrespectful of people in the Valley, but our goal is to build a product for the mainstream,” he said. His target audience lives in Ohio and reads USA Today.

What iCurrent does is filter the millions of news stories and blog posts produced every day into one page of must-read items. Rather than rely — like a feed reader does — on a selection of sources to produce and curate content, it keeps you up to date on your favorite topics.

To set up iCurrent you start by entering subject areas you’re interested in; sample topics might be “future of books,” “rebuilding the economy” or perhaps a more straightforward keyword like “college football.” The service will then build a front page of stories for you, and adjust what it shows based on your clickthroughs as well as any explicit granular feedback you give about what you like and dislike. It also delivers a less personal set of top news articles that may interest you. (If you’d like to try iCurrent, Rao has set up private beta invites for GigaOM readers who use the code “gigaom09.”)

Rao couldn’t specify exactly when the service will be available to the public, saying only: “When we’re ready. When the product’s ready.” But while he may not feel any urgency, it seems likely that in the meantime, the online news world will fill up with paywalls and even paid news aggregation. “There’s a roiling industry around us indeed,” he acknowledged. “We’re being as reactive and responsive to that but we’re a little dot and we’ll let them sort it out.”

While I have no doubt that iCurrent’s algorithms and editors are super smart, the site exists mostly outside of the emerging world of socially filtered information — where sites like Facebook and Twitter surface interesting links from our friends and networks. “Social is particularly good at filtering quality and alerting you rapidly on trending things, but no matter how many times someone else clicks it doesn’t make it interesting to you,” said Rao.

Rather, what iCurrent’s seven employees are wholly focused on is interpreting and anticipating potential users’ “extremely subtle set of requirements for reading.” Give it a whirl and let us know what you think.

It’s easy to confuse the technology industry with the shiny, attention-grabbing consumer web that’s comprised of services such as Twitter and Facebook, but there’s a whole slew of other, very vibrant Silicon Valley startups out there. One such company is 3-year-old Santa Clara, Calif.-based Data Robotics, maker of the Drobo line of data storage devices. It’s quietly turned into a niche — but fast-growing — player in the storage industry, to the point that founder and CEO Dr. Geoff Barrall has started dreaming of an initial public offering. Yes, you heard that right -– a startup not named Facebook is daring to dream big.

Data Robotics started out making a consumer storage device that used BeyondRAID technology to enable the backing up of digital data, first via USB and then over home networks. The $399 device could fit as many as four hard drives and had a full terabyte worth of total capacity. Drobo found willing buyers amongst early technology adopters -– including myself -– who were often buckling under the load of too much digital data. My music collection alone needed a terabyte of storage, mostly because I had ripped all my CDs in lossless format in order to achieve the highest possible fidelity.

Dr. Geoff Barrall

And while that was a good start, the company has since expanded its product line and started selling to small- and medium-sized businesses. “People who bought the product at home are the ones who are pushing the company’s offering into the business environment,” said Barrall. Indeed, Data Robotics’ transition to the enterprise is part of the larger trend in which technologies popularized by consumers are finding their way into the business environment.

Other examples of this trend in the storage space include Dropbox. Elsewhere, Skype is fast becoming part of the corporate terra firma and even giant corporations are tapping into Facebook’s social networking abilities to connect their organizations.

I recently caught up with Barrall, who was also formerly the CEO and founder of Blue Arc Systems. His long experience in the storage industry has helped the company attract $53 million in funding, including $10 million in its most recent round of investment led by Focus Ventures. Other investors in the company include Greylock Partners, New Enterprise Associates, RRE Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures. “We needed the money not to spend it but because we need a cushion as we have a lot of orders,” he told me.

All of these folks are betting on Barrall and so far, their faith is paying off. The DroboPro drive that costs as much as $3499 to store up to 16 terabytes of data is literally flying off the shelves. People are not only using it as a back-up solution, but to run applications.

Data Robotics’ storage devices compete with similar offerings from Hewlett-Packard (s HPQ) and Dell (s DELL), yet the company has been holding its own –- mostly because of its price and product advantages. Case in Point: the company just released Drobo S, a $799 drive that supports eSATA and adds an extra fifth bay for an additional hard drive that will allow it to accommodate up to 10 terabytes of data.

The Data Robotics Product Line-Up

To further its foray into these markets, the company last week introduced DroboElite, an iSCSI SAN storage solution that simplifies management and pools storage capacity across several servers. It costs roughly $6000 for a 16 TB system. “The goal has always been to work our way up to the SMB product line,” explained Barrall, pointing to the successful path Microsoft took from consumer desktops to corporate workstations, and from servers to bigger machines.

Data Robotics has so far sold 85,000 devices. Just 5,000 of them have been sold to business customers, but they account for about half of the company’s revenues. And while it’s not likely that the total volume of devices sold to businesses will ever exceed those of the Drobo consumer drives, Barrall is confident that more and more of his company’s revenues are going to come from small- and medium-sized businesses.

In the meantime, Data Robotics’ sales are soaring. After hitting $15 million a year after launching its first drive in June 2007, the company doubled its revenues over the next 12 months to over $30 million and hopes to hit $60 million by June 2010, its third year of selling Drobos. By the end of 2010, Barrall hopes his company will be on a run rate to achieve over $100 million in revenues sometime in 2011. The company is going to turn cash-flow positive — and profitable — in the first quarter of 2010, according to Barrall.

“And then (we’ll) go public,” he said. With sales growing and profits around the corner, I’m not surprised that this seasoned technology executive is thinking about an IPO. Much like the folks at Facebook.

As I continue to move in the Boston software development / high tech job market and talk to more and more people in the area, I not only come across the term “Scrum” in many job descriptions, but it is a word that is frequently bandied about by both recruiters and hiring managers. It is clear that there is alot of confusion in the Boston area about what “Scrum” really is, and how it relates to Agile.

There is no substitute for the experience of running Scrum daily for years, as I have done. My heartfelt advice to anyone looking to adopt Scrum in their organization is to be flexible, take it easy on the cutsey names, and keep the daily meetings very brief. If you are the “ScrumMaster”, stay organized and lead the conversation around the room, notating all limiting factors, as that becomes your to-do list. Drop me a line with your own insights or comments on Scrum!

Scrum, as some people already know, is a project managemnt methodology named after a contentious point in a rugby match. The Scrum project management method enables self-organizing teams by encouraging verbal communication across all team members and project stakeholders. At its foundation, Scrum’s primary principle is that traditional problem definition solution approaches do not always work, and that a formalized discovery process is sometimes needed.

Scrum’s major project artifact is a dynamic list of prioritized work to be done. Completion of a largely fixed set of backlogged items occurs in a series of short (many of 30 days duration) iterations, or “sprints”.

Every day a brief meeting or “Scrum” is held in which project progress is explained, upcoming work is described, and impediments are raised. A brief planning session occurs at the start of each sprint to define the backlog items to be completed. A brief postmortem or heartbeat retrospective occurs at the end of each sprint.

A “ScrumMaster” (my advice is to never call yourself this in actual human life in an office of programmers and IT personnel…but know the job well and do it well nevertheless if you are the individual who finds themselves in this role) removes obstacles or impediments to each sprint. The ScrumMaster is not the leader of the team, as they are self-organizing, but rather acts as a productivity buffer between the team and any destabilizing influences.

I sat down for a chat with Mikhail Surkan to discuss the challenges and opportunities for a starting a company in the middle of The Great Recession.  Speaking of challenges, we also discuss the prospects for Geedra in gaining traction in the construction industry.

There are two primary reasons why a founder needs rock hard abs:

1) working out of cafes and apartments, hunched over 12″ screens in shitty chairs with improper lumbar support is NOT good for your posture.  A strong core will help…

2) in the early stages of building a company, it is absolutely essential that you learn how to take a punch to the gut.

I have two close friends from Dartmouth who got flown out to the Valley this past weekend for final round interviews with Y Combinator.  Y Combinator is basically a hybrid venture capital firm/startup boot camp. A couple of times a year, they “admit” a class of very early stage startups, give them small dollars and a ton of advice and resources, and essentially groom them into venture-financable companies.  It is a spectacular head start for first time entrepreneurs, who give up less than 10% of their companies, and graduate with an embedded network and a sharper set of skills to go make it happen.

I just got the news that said friends didn’t make it in.  I thought for a few minutes about the implications of this data on the trajectory of their company, and realized that the actual value lost in that opportunity is minimal (a near commodity), but only if they replace that opportunity with something comparable, or even more valuable.  Is Y Combinator a great head start? Sure.  But so is the participation of some professional angels, or an early stage seed fund, or one of the 6 other clones of Y Combinator that have popped up in the last two years (Techstars, Dreamit, etc..).

BUT, it is not this value lost that poses the greatest threat to their business.  The real danger lies in the impact that bad news has on a company’s culture, founders’ state of mind, rate of progress, and general confidence.  After two months of product development, business planning, and strong forward momentum, my friends just got their first real “punch to the stomach.”  And that, by the way, is exactly what bad news feels like when you are starting out.  So much of your effort. time, and identity is wrapped up in this creation, that bad news can actually have a physical impact on founders.  Much like getting dumped by a woman you love, entrepreneurs will speak of a pain in their stomach or chest that they just can’t shake.

So much of early success comes from founders evangelizing their efforts, and sharing their company with anyone who will listen.  Momentum plays a huge role in a founder’s ability to do so, insofar as it is a lot easier to sell a vision that you passionately believe is going to come true, than it is to sell that same vision in a time of personal doubt.  Customers, partners, investors, friends, and family can smell that doubt in a founder’s mind.  This reality provides a positive feedback loop which furthers the doubt, and so on and so forth.

The same is 100% true for positive data…and therein lies one of the most important lessons I have learned about starting a company: No matter how bad the news, it is essential that you absorb that blow, deal with the immediate implications, and then do anything you can to generate some good news.  The faster you can cut off that positive feedback loop, and shift the momentum of your company back in the right direction, the better chance you have of replacing that “lost value” with something of comparable or greater value.  It is your responsibility as a founder, to turn this corner faster than everyone else in your company, and let them draft off of your forward momentum.

None of this is an argument for denial of the facts, and believe me, hindsight is 20/20 (there were days in Untitled Partners where I was not able to do this fast enough), but I think this skill, of taking a punch, and getting back up fast, is one of the most important to develop in a founder’s tool kit.  And there is no “faking it.”  You can’t just throw a smile on top of negative energy and sell everyone on “the positives.”  It is about actually addressing bad news, developing methods to accelerate your personal recovery time, and then quickly taking steps to right the ship.

Think about how many times Rocky gets pummeled in that fight with the giant Russian dude who killed Apollo.  Every time he gets knocked down to the mat, he gets back up faster…and at some point…the dude that’s throwing all the blows get’s tired, a window of opportunity emerges, and that’s when Rocky is able to start landing his jabs.  Momentum shifts, the crowd rises to their feet, the right kind of positive feedback loop commences, and he achieves the impossible.  Next time you watch that movie, take a look at Sly’s abs…rock hard, baby.  Team Data Owl…start doing crunches.  how fast can you flip this switch?

Waltham, MA-based ImmunoGen (NASDAQ: IMGN) said recently that Amgen has purchased a second license to develop a treatment that uses ImmunoGen’s technology for linking targeted antibodies to cell-killing agents that make them more potent. ImmunoGen will get $1 million upfront and could receive $34 million worth of milestone payments over time if Amgen is successful in developing a drug against an undisclosed target on cancer cells. Amgen bought its first such license to the ImmunoGen technology in September.