The Startup Success Podcast – After the demise of The Micro-ISV Show, Bob Walsh is back discussing issues affecting software startups. A good weekly listen.
Open Source, For-Profit Startups – “FairSoftware is the place to start and grow your online business. We help you team with others, track revenue and share it openly and fairly. Hire people in return for a share of your income stream instead of upfront cash. You save money and they have more incentive to collaborate.”
One Laptop Per Child Give One Get One 2008 – For $399 you get one XO laptop for yourself, and one is sent to a child in a developing nation. The keyboards are small, but they run Linux and have wireless NICs.
$19 Usability Testing - This is awesome. For around $19 (you can add bonus money to get your tests completed faster), you get a 15-minute video of a real user going through your site or web app, and a written summary of their findings. I’ve used it on two projects and it has raised a slew of issues we had no idea people would have problems with. Definitely worth a look.
And finally, from Paul Graham’s essay Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy (emphasis added):
If we’ve learned one thing from funding so many startups, it’s that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders. The economy has some effect, certainly, but as a predictor of success it’s a rounding error compared to the founders.
