andyangelos

Have not tried the book (waiting on my copy) but if your city has a refresh meetup - you should start there. This is the local chapter in Chicago http://www.meetup.com/Refresh-Chicago/ - well attended and interesting speakers.

These are just edible pickles - no promises of renewable energy that I know of. We have helped people make theremins, web apps, and curriculum already so pickles seems like a logical progression :)

We have not determined the spend with the founder yet - but are excited to have another physical product company. From our experience - the small amount of money can have a noticeable impact when you are not dealing with the abstractions of web startups. He has a product, fixed costs, and a process - so I am hoping we can connect him with people familiar with scaling single food products (getting into stores, higher production levels, etc). Also the marketing/branding since there are lot of creative campaign ideas surrounding a cartoon pickle.

Here is the post from RapLeaf's blog with analysis from their team.

http://blog.rapleaf.com/blog/2011/03/22/whats-cooking-in-the...

There are some success stories demonstrating that creating a buyer-seller hybrid is not always necessary. Take http://www.uship.com/ for example. Most ebay sellers and small business needing to ship packages will rarely have experience (or interest) in the trucking industry, but still need reliable delivery. The truckers using the service may list an item to be shipped in the future, but are most likely not the typical customer on the site.

The uship team just found two groups that were not paired and probably did a tremendous amount of legwork to create activity on both sides. I think sometimes you can just replace "they need to be the same person" with "we need to be solving a specific problem."

Bourgeois Pig has a decent selection of teas, including the Theanine heavy Gyokuro, but they don't sell in bulk. Their baristas might be able to tell you where they buy from though - assuming it is local.

I've purchased some decent Silver Needle at Coffee and Tea Exchange in Lakeview - but the prices are a little high.

Great suggestion, Vindexus. Some of the text definitely needs to be less verbose.

So the theme is "let users know about conveniently located competitions." definitely a possibility when more hackathons are using the site to organize. Chicago today - the world next.

Doh! Did not realize the link would not function in the description, so here it is again: http://www.hackathonia.com

Adding the TC synopsis of the project posted in another thread for continuity. http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/18/openstack-org-rackspace-ope...

Still in private beta (which does not help) but isocket.com would provide ease in billing, reporting, and adjusting rates. Worth signing up for notifications as a future solution :)

Have never used this http://www.openx.org/ - but removes the rate adjustment problem since you are dealing with a marketplace. Might be worth investigating as well.

Thanks for the props 100k. We noticed with Michael, the first recipient of a ScaleWell grant, that the community recognition allowed him to more efficiently collect feedback and support (his existing business seemed more "real").

So $1000 is not a lot, but in certain situations it is enough to propel an existing project toward revenue generation.

We are collecting donations for a n interesting charity at the event. Check out TechGYRLS http://bit.ly/1ty3zI - programs to teach technology skills to teenage girls.

An antiquated version of the printer vending machine existed via the grocery store copy machine - .10 per copy.

Appears Kinkos has done a better job of remaining flexible with their business model than the blockbusters and video stores of the world by accommodating remote printing.

We had over 70 participants including both trustees and applicants.

Part of the benefit of ScaleWell is office space in Chicago during the grant period, but we will entertain companies from the Midwest since most urban centers suffer from the same problem. If some from the coasts or the south applies at this point, we will at least provide some feedback from the trustees.

The Awesome Foundation established chapters, which is another long-term possibility...assuming we have success.

The Awesome Foundation was definitely an inspiration for ScaleWell. We applied the same mantra of supporting "Awesomeness" to the current entrepreneurial climate in Chicago - lack of recognition, lack of capital, lack of support institutions.

The $1000 and 2 months is comparable to the $5 and 2 hours thread (not mathematically) - forcing creativity and resourcefulness. Will be interesting to see how this manifests? (FYI: I am involved as a trustee).

Endless curiosity is important to avoid stagnation. However, there is still a difficult decision surrounding focus to be made when the "snowflake" is discovered. How do you decide when to turn off the exploration noise for a few months and build something awesome?

$50K would be nice. I would probably create an alter-identity and enter myself.

They have been promoting to their respective networks, but I like the idea of a community project. Makes "judging" for prizes more difficult but would rather have collaboration than winning. Thanks.

Agreed with @icey. You could probably locate a decent paying CPA from affiliate sites like http://www.wickedfire.com/ that would provide several bucks for each purchase/view of the advertised software solution. (A DIY tutorial making money from automated services. Ha!)

A main reason I plan to stay with Google is the ability to avoid visiting sites themselves unless I want to participate. For some reason constantly leaving and returning for information is not conducive for optimal consumption. Different information consumption needs indeed.

I use periodically when I am logged into CoTweet or TweetDeck and they are buried. Also, think the homepage has value for first time users (yes, they still exist) to understand how the site functions. Type in a topic and understand "Oh, people share short comments and I can get different information on topics than Google would provide." So yes, that can be valuable.

The "why and not the what" is an important consideration, especially for incorporating design elements from Google. If your site's primary benefit is the ability to quickly access information - a simple search box makes more sense than attempting to organize categories in another fashion (you spoke of the conditioning in search). When Twitter switched their homepage to something reminiscent of Google, I understood, I accepted and periodically use.

Liked the idea of starting with several hundred popular profiles (with the ability to submit your own for review). If I was a model or celeb using Twitter, I could see Hot Tweeter being a method for building an audience with teenagers.

Amazing thought! Having a business model outside of "exit" is really important but does not receive enough emphasis.

The emphasis on speed could also be detrimental to startups not building the next "killer app." Growing too fast too soon can result in some debilitating growing pains.

Probably never will? The average user may never use a Twitter like platform for banal updates or short, passionate discussion. However, simply sending mass messages to groups is powerful. For example, Pownce's calendar feature is very helpful for sending open invitation with a cal sync to large groups.

Another reason why users should leave Twitter and migrate to other services like Pownce. Suprisingly, the author of this post is a staff member of Pownce :)

I noticed an appropriate tweet summarizes this debate: "biz: Yesterday pizza was sent to Twitter HQ by friendly twitterers and today it's a keg of beer from @Mister_Robotics THANKS!"

The Twitter staff is apparently content eating pizza, drinking beer, and spending a freshly minted $15 million.