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Venture capitalists don’t want to pay their legal fees for financings. Don’t fight this term—that’s a “big move on a little issue.” Instead, cap your contribution to the investor’s legal bill. And watch the legal bills in small financings: don’t spend a large portion of the investment on lawyers or give up a lot of equity for the privilege of paying your investor’s legal bill.
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Forget about strings of pearls, dive watches or flower baskets. This could be the year of Barcaloungers and blenders. According to early online shopping statistics, sales of holiday stalwarts like jewelry, watches and flowers have dropped from last year’s levels, while sales of more practical items like furniture and appliances have climbed about 70 percent.
Tag: Steve Woda Page 5 of 6
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As the holiday shopping season is getting shorter, the biggest procrastinators are men, according to NRF’s 2007 Holiday Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, conducted by BIGresearch. The survey found that 19.4% of men had yet to begin their holiday sho
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Software pirates who peddle their goods on eBay, watch out. A software industry trade group is hoping to entice buyers of counterfeit computer programs to blow the whistle on sellers by offering rewards of up to $500.
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A parody of Clement Clark Moore’s "A Visit from St. Nicholas" by Margaret Woda. Yes. Margaret is related to me. She is my mom, and she is really teaching me a thing or two about how to blog for business. Keep up the great work Mom!
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December is an unlucky month for one online payment service. BidPay.com sent an email to users on Wednesday informing them it was discontinuing operations effective December 31, 2007, but gave no reason. It was 2 years ago this month that First Data Corporation abruptly closed BidPay before selling it to CyberSource Corporation.
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It has been called a competitor to Wikipedia, Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo, Seth Godin’s Squidoo and Yahoo Answers: Knol is Google’s foray into knowledge aggregation. Knol lets users produce web pages devoted to various subject matter.
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The year 2007 may go down in the annals of Internet crime as the year when organized cyber criminals finally got serious about their marketing strategies — crafting cyber schemes that were significantly more sophisticated and stealthy. Security experts say criminals are increasingly trying to ensnare Internet users by lurking on familiar Web sites and using purloined data to craft scam e-mails that are more believable, and thus more likely to entice an unsuspecting user.
Over the last few years, I have presented to dozens of venture capital firms while fundraising, and inevitably, the venture capital investor always asks you what valuation you are looking for. This reminds me of that job interview question we have all been asked… "What are your biggest weaknesses?" There really isn’t a right answer, but there sure are a lot of bad answers.
Stu Phillips does a nice job of explaining how to answer this important VC question on his blog, Soaring on Ridgelift.
One hint… Don’t answer the question!
Well, there is actually more to that conclusion, but you can read the details in Stu’s blog post, The Valuation Trap.
Nice post Stu!
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Microsoft Corp. said Wednesday it has acquired a United Kingdom online mapping company to enhance its existing Windows Live Web-based services.The software maker did not say what it paid for Multimap, which provides street-level maps, travel directions and local information. Multimap also offers hotel and restaurant-booking services and builds private-label mapping tools for companies, including Hilton Hotels and Ford.
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A federal judge ruled that Web auctioneer eBay Inc. must pay about $30 million in damages to MercExchange LLC as part of a long-running dispute over a patent related to the ecommerce company’s "Buy It Now" fixed-price feature. The ruling marks a setback for eBay in a series of recent legal challenges.
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This is the first in a series on osCommerce, the popular free, open-source shopping cart alternative, and the industry it has spawned. I found this article to be an excellent overview of the history of osCommerce shopping carts, the major osCommerce players as well as the technical support resources that exist for the osCommerce products. As you may know, buySAFE is available for most of the osCommerce shopping cart platforms including osCommerce, Cube Cart, Zen Cart, CRELoaded, and X Cart, so if you already use one of these platforms and are interested in buySAFE, just email buySAFE’s customer support team and we will help you out.
- Happy Holiday for European Web Shops? – eMarketer
Retail e-commerce continues to grow in the largest Western European economies. 160.6 million European Internet users visited online retail sites in the month of October 2007. This article provides a number of other interesting facts about European ecommerce.
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This week PayPal released a new Web widget that lets you embed a virtual storefront onto your blog or any Web site that uses HTML code. The PayPal Storefront Widget allow you to list products, set prices and start selling in an online storefront format. This Widget has real utility, and so you will want to check it out.
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Henry Blodget writes in Silicon Alley Insider that eBay CEO Meg Whitman is "one of the Valley’s most celebrated and admired executives" but thinks it is becoming increasingly clear that Whitman is not the right person for the job. In this blog post, Ina asks the hard questions.
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A Consumer Reports press statement on the problem of counterfeit items said consumers should be suspicious of third-party websites that offer deep discounts for products that are usually pricey. eBay has become a Market for Lemons in a number of product categories (Tiffany products is just one of many examples), and so this is not surprising.