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App Economy Creates Nearly 500k Jobs in US: Before the iPhone there was no app industry, but with the meteoric expansion of it and rival devices, the sector now employs in the region of half a million people in the United States alone.

Flexible Screens Have Arrived: C3Nano, a company that makes transparent, flexible screens has secured a round of funding worth $6.7, and is building relationships in Japan and Korea with giants such as Samsung. The technology boasts it’s robust and cost effective. (Includes demo video)

StartUp May Save Businesses Fortunes in Legal Costs: Technology has limited, changed or destroyed many long established industries, now it might be the turn of the legal professions to take a battering, having to compete with technological solutions to some of its core business practices.

The World’s Smallest 3D Printer (Video): What could you do with the world’s smallest 3D printer? At TEDxVienna Klaus Stadlmann demos his tiny, affordable printer that could someday make customized hearing aids or sculptures smaller than a human hair.

Googling the term, you get a myriad of results. Many are for business or consultancy related groups and services that use the ‘upstart’ interchangeably with ‘startup’.

The online dictionary definitions which appear are all similar to this one:

n. A person of humble origin who attains sudden wealth, power, or importance, especially one made immodest or presumptuous by the change; a parvenu.

adj. 1. Suddenly raised to a position of consequence.
2. Self-important; presumptuous.

Reading between the lines in the tech blogs it appears that the difference is this; ‘Startups’ are entrepreneurial businesses that begin with external funding from venture capital from their inception. However, ‘Upstart’ businesses begin without significant external funding, just savings and personal loans from friends and family and usually the founders maintain all equity. This is in keeping with the upstart definition, springing from humble origins to wealth, rather than having lots of cash to play with before you have a customer.

Felix Dennis, Author of How to Get Rich (Image: BBC)

Felix Dennis, author of the refreshingly direct, ‘How to Get Rich’, is very much in the upstart mould and believes a business owner should do everything in their power to hold on to the most equity possible. Each percentage of equity you manage to own, could be worth millions when you eventually sell your business. In one chapter he describes how two important employees at his magazine demanded a small share of the business or they’d start a rival publication.

He instantly called their bluff, fired them and wished them well in their new venture. Within a few years their business was bust and they were back working for him, no hard feelings. When he sold up and moved on, that tiny percentage they had demanded was worth millions; his baby, his millions. Dennis put it in uncompromising terms:

Talent is indispensable, although it is always replaceable.

Just remember the simple rules concerning talent:

Identify It, Hire It, Nurture It, Reward It, Protect It. And when the time comes, Fire It.

Nobody likes ultimatums. Such swift and decisive action to an ultimatum is admirable if not ruthless. While stock and shareholder options can be a positive motivator and ascribe a sense of ownership, pride and involvement in a large corporation with 100s or 1000s of share holders, it’s a very different animal when there’s just one owner. Even if you’re only parting with 1% not fifty, there are now two of you in the business, regardless of the breakdown things are far more complicated. If he gave those two guys a percentage, how long until the next one is up demanding their share? It wasn’t their baby, it was his and he stuck to his guns and understood who was replaceable and who was not.

The flip side is, it’s better to have a percentage of something, than a 100% of nothing.

Not all businesses can be started from a bedroom or garage. Many modern startups wouldn’t be possible without starting capital in the first place. Many require capital before they can achieve what’s called a ‘Minimal Viable Product’ to test in the market. When you need to pay a room full of coders or for expensive bio-tech equipment you need capital there’s no way around it. However most ideas don’t need much money to deliver the most basic rendering of a product to market.

When you take in venture capital you’re no longer your own boss, you have investors to answer to and they want results. If you’re lucky they’ll have a more medium term perspective than mere short term gain and will provide significant expertise to help you along on top of the cash and capital injection. An article in a recent Friday shorts blog roundup, 10 Reasons Why VC backed Startups Fail, number eight was a big one, the lack of adding value beyond the money.

90% of VC’s don’t add value… They’re spread a mile wide and an inch deep. Most don’t really understand the way that technology is changing within any one space (although they will claim to).

Dragons’ Den is a great example of this. The really smart entrepreneurs who they return to later to see how well they’re doing, knew they weren’t just there for the capital, they needed the exposure of the show and the connections of the dragons. All that extra value beyond the cash investment.

So, upstart or startup? If it’s your baby and you don’t require massive capital to begin, go ‘upstart’ and get a minimal viable product tested and selling. Then if you need a big boost, venture capital is an option when you’ve a proven business to invest in. If you’re aiming to work for a new business for the challenge and opportunities, aim for a startup, they’re used to dividing equity with venture capital and so are often willing to attract top staff with share options.

What are your thoughts on Upstarts vs Startups? Are you in one or running one? Do you have venture capital or have you gone it alone?

The Oatmeal - What I want from a restaurant website (click to view full image)

Image by Carrot Creative

Twitter is More Addictive than Nicotine: People are more likely to give in to the urge to tweet or check email than other cravings a US study has found, making it more addictive than both alcohol and cigarettes. Could it just be that twitter isn’t as obviously costly or damaging to your health?

Beijing Micro Bloggers Must Use Real Name or Be Banned: The Chinese government says all microbloggers in Beijing must post under their real names by March 16 or they’ll be banned from the service. The move from the Chinese government is the latest in a series of ways they want to monitor and curtail social media activity in their country.

When the SuperBowl Bored Americans, They Opened Apps: At the less captivating moments of this year’s Super Bowl audiences turned to their second screens, you can see clearly which ads and which game play were captivating and hit the mark and which fumbled and dropped the ball.

YouTube Expands Channels Initiative: Last October, Google announced it would begin rolling out over 100 new channels featuring original programming across YouTube, turning the site focus from one-off videos into a major online content destination, two new automotive channels are its latest offering.

1000+ Directory Submission for 5¢ Each. High PR Directories!

Submit to 700,000+ search engines. Packages Starting at $14.95

If you use one of these paid services to have your site submitted to search engines, you might as well burn your money.

There’s two very simple reasons why these services are not worth it.

It’s All About Market Share

The first reason is market share – there are only two search engines that you need care about, which will drive 97-99% of the traffic for most websites.

Google controls between 83% and 92% of all search traffic, globably. The other search engines you might care about are Yahoo, Bing and Ask (and if you’re based in the USA you might care about the 2% of Americans who use AOL). All the rest of the thousands of search engines combine to less than 1% of the entire market share except in specific niche areas (see the bottom of this post for more info).

But Google + Yahoo + Bing + Ask + AOL makes five, and I mentioned only two above, right?

Actually, life is easier for us than that. Yahoo results are now powered by Bing, and both AOL and Ask are powered by Google, so in actual fact we only need to submit to Google and Bing to get a 97-99% coverage of all search traffic. You can submit your website to these two search engines for free here:

• Submit your site to Google
• Submit your site to Bing

The Second Dirty Secret

The second secret is that you don’t even need to submit your site to the search engines at all. If an existing website – that is already in the search engines – links to your website, the search engines will add your site automatically – no action needed on your part. Sometimes this takes a while, so it doesn’t hurt to submit your site using the links above if you want to speed things along.

Search Engine Market Share Stats

“Google enjoys the bulk of the UK search engine market share, handling 90.84 per cent of all queries, light years ahead of Yahoo with 2.31 per cent and Microsoft with 3.78 per cent. Across the Atlantic, it’s slightly more balanced. Google’s US search engine market share is still very healthy at 61 per cent, but it’s not completely out of sight for Yahoo with 17 per cent and Microsoft with 15 per cent” theEword.co.uk

The exact stats vary by region and by device type (desktop computer vs mobile device). For example, Google has a far lower market share in the USA than the UK on desktops, but very high market share on mobile devices in all regions. If you’re specifically targeting Asia you might also want to look at Baidu, which has a larger market share in that region.

For more statistics, have a look at the NetMarketshare site and theEword search engine stats page.

"Potential" - from Xkcd.com

Facebook Files for $5bn IPO: Only eight years after creating the site from his Harvard dorm room, Mark Zuckerberg’s stake in Facebook is $28bn, the full value of the company estimated to be £100bn.

What Will Facebook Do With All That Money?: The social giant will have raised an astounding $2.8 billion. What in the world will Facebook buy with all that cash?

Parking Sensors to Take Pain Out of Finding a Space: A “parking patch” could bring together wireless sensors and mobile apps to steer drivers towards vacant spots, and lead traffic wardens to parking offenders.

We Are All Cyborgs (TED Video): Technology is evolving us, says Amber Case, as we become a screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens. We now rely on “external brains” (cell phones and computers) to communicate, remember, even live out secondary lives. But will these machines ultimately connect or conquer us? Case offers surprising insight into our cyborg selves.

• you might want to check how many clicks your externally hosted RSS feed gets,
• you might want to track referrals for advertising revenue or affiliates,
• you might want to create a popularity graphs for sites you link to,
• or you might just be curious!

Here’s a rundown of a few different ways you can count clicks on links outbound from your website, and when you might want to use them:

• Use a Shortlink Service Like Bit.ly
• Use a Plugin for Your CMS
• Use Google Analytics (or Another Tracking Service) to Track Clicks
• Use a Tracking Script on Your Own Server

Some of these methods also allow you to create shorter, branded “pretty” URLs, and allow you to change a URL on many different pages from just one location.

Use a Shortlink Service Like Bit.ly

Link shorteners like bit.ly, is.gd and tinyurl were originally setup to make long URLs shorter to squeeze them into places where there is space limitation like email, the 140 characters of twitter, phone SMS messages, etc. But some shortlink services now provide a lot of analytics data when you use them as a signed in user.

Use this method when:

• you want to setup tracking quickly
• you want track referrer metadata
• you want to create a branded link

How to do it: sign up for a free account on Bit.ly. When you’re signed into your account, create a new shortcode for your link, e.g. http://bit.ly/zAy4rv. Change the outgoing link from http://www.outgoingdomain.com to http://bit.ly/zAy4rv. To view the statistics go to http://bit.ly/zAy4rv+ (the short URL with a + plus on the end) – this will show you the bit.ly “Info Page+” page for this link which includes the total number of clicks, Tweets and Likes, as well as referrer information like countries, web browser, etc.

Use a Plugin for Your CMS

If you use a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress on your website, then you can use a plugin that redirects and tracks links for you. A really powerful plugin like Pretty Link makes outgoing link tracking incredibly simple.

Use this method when:

• you want the tracking data kept on your own servers
• you want to create a branded link
• you want to be able to change links on many different pages from one single location
• you use a CMS that has plugins available

How to do it: install & activate the Pretty Link plugin, click on Add New Link on your dashboard, fill in the URL and hit Create. Copy the resultant link and use that to link to the target website – the plugin will now count how many outgoing clicks it gets.

You can use this to create URLs such as example.com/go/company. You’ll often see these used for outgoing links, particularly for affilate links. These are used for ease of management, tracking, branding, cloaking links to preventing hoplink theft, etc.

The advantage of these kinds of pretty links is you can track all the clicks from that URL, they make the long ugly affiliate URLs into a short pretty branded URL, and we can change the URL on a lot of pages if needed. For example, recently StudioPress changed their affiliate program provider from E-Junkie to Shareasale. If you did not have this option, then you would need to edit each page that the link appears on and change it manually. With this plugin, you simply change the redirect location on one link – example.com/go/studiopress, and it’s changed it on all pages!

Another nice plugin for integration of tracking with Google Analytics is Joost de Valk’s Google Analytics WordPress plugin. He has an article on using Content Drilldown to see outbound clicks on his blog. Which leads us nicely on to…

Use Google Analytics or Another Tracking Service to Track Clicks

You can use Analytics to track clicks on links by manually tagging the outbound link that you want to track. This only works if the visitor clicks directly on the link and does not record visitors who choose “Open in New Tab/Window”.

Use this method when:

• you want to integrate the tracking data with your Google Analytics account

To use it, you need to tag each outbound link with some JavaScript code that looks like this:

<a href="http://www.outgoingdomain.com" onClick="recordOutboundLink(this, 'Outbound Links', 'example.com');return false;">

You’ll also need to add some JavaScript to the HTML header, and edit the tracking code – usually in either the header or at the bottom of the page. This Google Analytics help page shows you how to set it up. If you’re not using Google Analytics, search your analytics provider knowledge base for information on tracking outgoing links.

Using a Tracking Script on Your Own Server

A more advanced method for those happy to get their hands dirty with a little programming. What you need to do is add a script to your website which is called whenever you have an outgoing link (we have a free example below). This script should add to a counter every time someone leaves your site via this link, and you should be able to view the count either directly in the database, or create another script to view stats.

Use this method when:

• you want the tracking data kept on your own servers
• you want to integrate the tracking within your own customized scripts

One free example script to do this MyRedirector, a PHP script by Mark Kronsbein. To install the script, copy the code and separate it into the 3 files – the redirect script, the view stats script and the database creation script. Create the database table and edit the other two scripts with the correct access details. For an average programmer, this is less than 5 minutes work.

Once that is set up, just change the outgoing link from http://www.outgoingdomain.com to http://www.yoursite.com/redirect.php?url=http://www.outgoingdomain.com where redirect.php is the name you used.

Advanced note: by default this particular script gives back a 302 to the browser. This is a good thing, since unlike a 301, a 302 status code means that the redirect should not be cached and the browser should retrieve the same location again.

Suggestions & Questions

Do you have any suggestions for other methods – or improvements to the methods I’ve listed here? Or do you have any questions on particular methods, when to use them, or even the code involved? Post a message with as much information as possible for us in the comments and I’ll address it here.

Post inspired by this question on boards.ie.

1. WordPress is Easy

Once you get the hang of it WordPress is a beautifully intuitive system to operate. Ok, some things are a little tricky but they’re a lot less so with WP than any and all of it’s rivals. The complication comes from it’s power, but for most functions it’s wonderfully intuitive.

2. It’s the Biggest and Most Popular CMS in the World

WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) in the world, which means more people run it, innovate with it and improve it than most of the leading rival systems put together. That scale of use means it evolves and improves faster than all the others.

3. Over 17,000 Ways to Enhance Your Site for Free

Plugins for WordPress are like apps for your smartphone; they massively increase the functionality and possibilities for your website. The vast majority are free and there are more developers creating new plugins or updates to plugins than any other system. This includes shopping carts, photo galleries, currency converters, Google Maps and thousands of other very handy functions to beef up your site and help your visitors do more.

4. Themes – Get a Highly Professional Look for under $100

Because the content is always kept separate from the design, you can simply switch between layouts and designs in seconds. Over 1,400 themes are free but from about $25 to $75 you can get professionally designed themes which would cost $1000s to have done just for you. They’re all hugely customisable so you don’t have to worry about too many websites looking the same.

5. WordPress is Free

Unlike so many dreadful push button, turn key website solutions, the WordPress.org system is open source and completely free.

How to Become an Effective CEO, Chief Emotions Officer: Tim Ferriss introduces a guest post by “most innovative” award winning CEO and boutique hotel owner Chip Conley on his latest book ‘Emotional Equations, Simple Truths for Creating Happiness + Success’. It may sound a little schmalzy, but there’s some good constructive and positive stuff in there.

Why Facebook is Making People Sad: As Facebook becomes a more powerful influence in our daily existence, researchers are looking into how the social networking giant changes our perception of the lives of friends and family members.

Why Startups Succeed or Fail: 10 Fascinating Hardvard Findings: Key insights into what makes entrepreneurial success from a Harvard Business school working paper, some confirm what we know, some are quite counter-intuitive.

How to Make a Splash in Social Media: In this funny, rapid-fire 4 minutes, Alexis Ohanian of Reddit tells the real-life fable of one humpback whale’s rise to Web stardom. The lesson of Mister Splashy Pants is a shoo-in classic for meme-makers and marketers in the Facebook age.

The number of signatures on the petition against “SOPA Ireland” (or “Sherlock’s Folly” as some are calling it) is now hitting 60,000 – an incredible number for a petition started just days ago. If you’re an Irish citizen and haven’t yet, please sign it.

There was a brief 15 minute debate in an empty government chamber last night, but thankfully a little common sense seems to be applied to the situation and we’ll have a 50 minute debate on Tuesday next.

Mark Dennehy has a great blog post on his work to get reforms in legislation and why he thinks the system itself needs an overhaul:

I’ve given up on the idea of working legislation in this country at this stage in almost any area of life. We’d need major change to fix the system of government before we’d get decent legislation for anything

We’re going to get some more debate on this issue, but Sherlock appears intent on signing. He seems naive enough to believe that his legislation is fine as it is, and that the courts will deal with any spurious legislation. This beggars belief – we’ve seen the film and music industry in America taking dead people and people who don’t even own computers to court for online copyright violations.

Individuals and small businesses who can’t afford to fight won’t stand a chance – when they get a threatening letter they will not risk the chance of court costs, regardless of how spurious it is.

–

Original post:

Last week, we had SOPA and PIPA in the US. This week in Ireland, in an even less democratic fashion, we have a “statutory instrument”, which requires no parlimentary or public debate, ready to be signed into law by a single minister’s pen.

The “Statutory Instrument Number (TBD) of 2011 European Communities (Copyright and Related Rights) Regulations 2011″, otherwise known as the “Irish SOPA” is allegedly being enacted in order to comply with EU law, but the European Commission – which monitors implementation of EU law – doesn’t seem to think Ireland is in breach and hasn’t taken any action against Ireland for failure to introduce blocking.

The situation can no longer be tolerated where Irish Ministers enact EU legislation by statutory instrument. The checks and balances of parliamentary democracy are by-passed.

Very wise! Who said that? Why, the current government in their Programme For Government 2011!

So we have a law being rushed in by the government, with no parlimentary debate – against the wishes of the government’s own programme, in order to comply with EU law that we’re probably not in breach of. It gets worse! The proposed amendment is so vague that no one is completely sure what it will actually mean, even the guy signing it into law. Here’s one interpretation from the chairman of Digital Rights Ireland:

This will give the Irish courts an open-ended power to grant orders against ISPs and other intermediaries who provide facilities which might be used to infringe copyright. This could include hosting providers, social networks, forums, video hosting sites – potentially most online services.

TJ McIntyre (IT Law in Ireland)

And from Ireland’s largest hosting company:

What that translates into in plain English is that we, a hosting provider, could be held liable for a copyright infringement that we knew nothing about. Of course it goes further than that, as it could be (ab)used and force us, and others in industry, to either block access (filter) your internet connection or disable access to entire websites and domains. Or taking it further, if a rights holder found an infringing photo on Facebook they could demand that the site be blocked!

Michele Neylon (Blacknight)

Let’s be clear: I’ve created software and multimedia digital products. I really don’t want people to steal my digital content because it puts food on the table.

But I equally don’t want crazily open ended legislation enacted in my name, or in the name of any content creator from Hollywood to Dublin.

If we need to introduce legislation, let’s take the time to have a full and open debate, and let’s make sure it’s limited in scope so that it covers what it needs to and no more.

There are three ways to fight piracy: endless legal actions, legally blocking access, or creating alternative legit offers.

Frédéric Filloux (MondayNote.com)

Creating alternative offers works. Don’t believe me, listen to one of the richest game developers on Earth:

The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting anti-piracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.

Now we did something where we decided to look at price elasticity. We do a 75 percent price reduction, our experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40.

Gabe Newell (owner of game developer Valve Corporation)

Governments around the world are trying to introduce legislation to allegedly protect digital rights holders from online piracy, at the behest of a small number of very large multinational corporations who refuse to accept the changed landscape of digital content production. Most of these legislative efforts are inept at best, and totally corrupt at worst.

The RIAA approach is to sue everyone in sight. Thankfully that doesn’t seem to be going so well for them lately.

Because of the MPAA you can’t watch a movie without being forced to watch a long anti-piracy warning (unless, of course, you pirate the movie).

Ridiculously, in Canada and some EU & other countries, you get charged a levy on all blank CDs and SD cards – which are obviously used only to pirate music and never, ever just to back up your Documents folder from last year, right? Monies collected are distributed to rights holders based on commercial radio airplay and commercial sales samples, ignoring radio/college airplay and independent record sales – all of which favours major-label artists. Does that mean I should just buy blank CDs and borrow my Canuck friend’s CD collection for the weekend – I mean it is already paid for, right?

ACTA is an another one of these pieces of legislation, in the form of an international trade agreement. The “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” currently being negotiated by the European Union, the United States, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Australia as well as a few other countries, whose aim is to enforce copyright and tackle counterfeited goods.

Super, I’m all for that! Unless it has really bad side effects, of course.

We are in danger of ending up with the worst of both worlds, pushing IP rules, which are very effective at stopping access to life-saving drugs but are very bad at stopping or preventing fake drugs.

Michelle Childs (Médecins Sans Frontières)

Why are all the ACTA negotiations being done secretly? Leaked documents show that one of the major goals of ACTA is to force signatory countries into implementing anti file-sharing and net filtering practices. Where have we seen this before? Ah yes, hello MPAA, RIAA, SOPA and (deep breath) our own Statutory Instrument Number (TBD) of 2011 European Communities (Copyright and Related Rights) Regulations 2011 (whew).

Even though a substantial portion of my living comes from the entertainment industry, I don’t think that any amount of “piracy” justifies this kind of depraved indifference to the consequences of one’s actions.

Big Content haven’t just declared war on [..] the “fun” Internet: they’ve declared war on every person who uses the net to publicize police brutality, every oppressed person in the Arab Spring who used the net to organize protests and publicize the blood spilled by their oppressors[..] — as well as the scientists, [..] rescue workers who coordinate online, the makers who trade tips online, the people with rare diseases who support each other online, and the independent creators who use the Internet to earn their livings.

Cory Doctorow (blogger, journalist, and science fiction author)

The Irish SOPA originally had a deadline of next Tuesday, but it looks like the Minister has taken heed of the huge amount of opposition this has generated in such a short time, and will probably abandon the deadline:

Just learned that SOPA legislation NOT going to go ahead without public debate, I believe in the Dáil. Good politics from Gov & Opp.

— Stephen Donnelly TD (@DonnellyStephen) January 25, 2012

Let the government know of your opposition by signing the stopSOPAireland petition here which is currently at around 44,000 signatures (and gaining around 8-10,000 per day over the past 3 days), and tweet your comments with the #SOPAireland hashtag.

As for ACTA, it has the potential to be even worse, and possibly thanks to the secrecy in negotiations, we know very little for sure. Learn more about ACTA here and search for #ACTA on Twitter.

Do your part to learn more about IP rights and piracy. This issue has huge ramifications for the development of the internet and thus our entire society – the future of privacy, communication and commerce for the entire race. It is not a clear cut issue as some interested parties would have you believe. I’ll sign off with this brilliantly simple TED talk on SOPA from Clay Shirky:

Anonymous Take Down FBI

Anonymous Take Down the Websites of Dept of Justice, Universal Music, BMI & the FBI:   Hacker Collective Anonymous attacked and took down dozens of websites yesterday in retaliation for the FBI shutting down several sites that they believed pirate media illegally.

Facebook Begins News Feed Ads Rollout: Facebook began a slow rollout of ads to the news feed today, but the units are not called Sponsored Stories as some anticipated.

HP Unveil Giant 11 ft x 7ft Touchscreen For Retailers and Businesses: The HP Vantage Point system is powered by two computers with one graphics card and six monitors, yet this touchscreen can simultaneously register input from 32 fingers. It extends the portfolio of “immersive displays” from HP Labs and is designed as a tool for showcasing retail goods or enterprise data.

The Best Definition for ‘Entrepreneur’?: As an entrepreneur, you surely have an elevator pitch, the 15-second synopsis of what your company does and why, and you can all but repeat it in your sleep. But until recently, most of us have ever seen a good elevator pitch for entrepreneurship itself. What you do that all entrepreneurs do?

As always, your thoughts, opinions and comments are most welcome and appreciated