HuffPo headlines are pure sensationalism, but at least you know they aren't paying for content and they actually have good writers (I think). It's fun because it's so in-your-face. I hope they don't sell to Yahoo.
This has concerned me too, Dave. All you have to do is look at AOL's SEED Network with its tutorials on how to write a sentence with correct grammar to see they are paying $10 to help literacy as much as anything else. If you check out their "technology" network, would you be likely visit these sites for technology content? www.seed.com/aol-network/I certainly wouldn't!
It is scarey the power AOL has to dominate the first pages of search with this cattle-call strategy. This is a great argument for curated content like Regator's and for additional filter systems for news with a clear editorial slant life Huffington Post or Drudge Report.
On the other hand, this onslaught of vanilla content from AOL may help traditional newspapers sell online subscriptions so consumers can at least know the editorial slant. The NY Times is offering an online subscription keeping much of its print format for ~$4.50 a week and I am thinking now it may be successful after all.
Actually, I rather like "I Can Has Cheeseburger" because LOLCats are just so stupid. I think Letterman started it with his "kitties" nonsense. I prefer this one for LOLDogs, however: ihasahotdog.com/
In Atlanta, startups wear "bootstrap-financed" like a badge of honor but I argue that unless you have a strong technologist co-founder and a really talented founding team generally, you simply must get funding to build a team to get serious traction. However, the angels and big VC firms here are looking for the huge deals of old and B2B plays. I know of no local angels here who invest in the consumer internet or real time data space other than a couple of really small investments made following Shotput Ventures.
Look how differently investing operates in the Valley (to which Atlanta has now lost at least 3 very promising entrepreneurs in the last 2 years). Look at super angels like Ron Conway of SV Angel LLC who has invested in 40-50 plays in the real time data space this year: http://www.crunchbase.com/person/ron-conway. These are relatively small deals, capital light -- but they do require some rounds of investment and are not bootstrapped.
It isn't just Atlanta. Boston and other cities outside of the Valley lose entrepreneurs for money, too. An example is WePay, whose founders are Boston College grads who didn't get into Tech Stars Boston but were accepted at Y Combinator last summer to test their beta product. After Demo Day, they recruited a couple more team members from the east coast and relocated to Palo Alto. They've recently raised a $1.65M round from August Capital, Ron Conway, Max Levchin (a founder of PayPal) and an A-list of other investors in their space.
Maybe a few startups survive bootstrapping and flourish, but most are just "strapped" and fold.
Very interesting stuff. Probably the greatest value will be the wealth of data gathered from the biobanking you agreed to. Glad you consented to that. DNA is mind-boggling, and Watson & Crick made the most import discovery of the Century elucidating its double-helix architecture in 1953, in my opinion.
I hope Twitpay' new iteration will make available a linkable button like PayPal offers that says, "Sponsor" or "Donate," etc. We have raised money 8 times this year on http://techdrawl.com and used both Twitpay and PayPal. PayPal's catchy Donate button has garnered 9 out of 10 donations (correlation but not necessarily causal), although we we trying to support local southern startup Twitpay!
Russell, this is an awesome and very thorough visualization and analysis of Atlanta's cluster of security-focused companies. Luckily for Atlanta, the emerging convergence of TV-mobile-computer to a single device presents a tremendous need for more and more security products. Too, the threat of Internet terrorism does the same. Great job. Fascinating visualization.
We have had several suggestions via Skribit this week. Some are using it to make snarky comments that stay on the home page and not really because they expect a post about it on http://www.techdrawl.com. We'll leave them up for awhile.
Nice interview, Russell. David and Ron, thanks for making the US world trendsetters in technology innovation with your "high touch" support to entrepreneurs. We're on your team, just on the other side of the country.