Online and on TV, Dragons‘ Den sees entrepreneurs pitching for investment from some of Britain’s top business brains. However how will the do against a Cassetteboy remix?

At a time when many Western media outlets are contracting, Chinese media outlets are expanding, rapidly. Beijing is pouring billions into the country’s state-run media machine, which is churning out new TV networks, radio stations and newspapers aimed at foreign audiences.

But there are gaps emerging for non-state broadcasters to operate. One such TV station is Blue Ocean Network (BON TV) that is owned and operated by Chinese from within China. It hopes to offer American cable TV viewers a new perspective on the world’s most populous country.

The key difference between BON TV and its state-owned counterparts is that, well, it is not state-owned. According to its co-founder Justin Ku, an ethnic Chinese who holds an American passport, the project has not received government money.

read original article edition.cnn.com

Apple downsizes its mid-range iPod, but upsizes the awesomeness. At about half the size and weight of its predecessor, the iPod Nano 6 ($149-$179) shrinks down

and gets a new Multi-Touch display, a polished aluminum and glass enclosure with belt clip, and a built-in FM radio (with ability to pause and resume playing FM), a built-in pedometer, and support for Nike + iPod. Your choice 8GB or 16GB sizes in silver, graphite, blue, green, orange or pink.via uncrate.com

]]> http://www.thinkbigbebigentrepreneurs.com/2010/09/ipod-nano-6/feed/ 0 http://www.thinkbigbebigentrepreneurs.com/2010/08/how-to-launch-a-business-in-10-steps-with-less-than-2000/ http://www.thinkbigbebigentrepreneurs.com/2010/08/how-to-launch-a-business-in-10-steps-with-less-than-2000/#comments Tue, 31 Aug 2010 08:57:25 +0000 Timothy Bosworth http://www.thinkbigbebigentrepreneurs.com/?p=2893

Interesting presentation from The Founder Institute about How To Launch a business In 10 Steps With Less Than $2,000.

Adeo Ressi on Product Development 08/19/2010 from Adeo Ressi on Vimeo.

Below is a bullet point summary of Ressi’s ten steps to launch. The video above significantly elaborates on these points.

1. Get your domain and e-mail working: “When you register your name, you should register the misspellings as a .com, you should register the primary and the .net or .org or it will be sold back to you for thousands of dollars later…”
Approximate cost: $160

2. Produce some mock-ups: “You want to show the key functionality that you’re trying to bring to the marketplace…You just need three sort of pivotal experience screens that will demonstrate your core idea or three…mock-ups of the physical product…you’re trying to capture how it will be done.”
Approximate cost: Free

3. Logo and materials: “Get a good looking logo so at least you look legitimate…” says Ressi who recommends 99designs. After you pick the winning design, “you contact him [the designer] offline, you say I want you to do my business cards, I want you to do my Power Point backup and I want you to do my mock-ups. Now for not so much money you’re getting everything you need to appear somewhat legitimate to the world.”
Approximate cost: $750

4. Pitch deck: “You always want to have a pitch deck, even if it’s bad…you need something to start with to go on that refining path.”
Approximate cost: Free

5. Create a landing page: Ressi recommends Unbounce.com, which is a drag and drop landing page.
Approximate cost: $60/year after free trial

6. Create a company blog: “I recommend doing blog.yourcompany.com…it keeps it in a consistent place as your company scales…You want to be posting on your blog, at this phase, one or two times a week.”
Approximate cost: Free

7. Test marketing: “First thing I strongly recommend is immediately test marketing using Facebook and Google ads. Not so much for the value of driving people to your bullsh*t website, but to understand what messages resonate with your target audience and then so you can then refine your marketing messages.”
Approximate cost: $250

8. Survey customers: “So now you’ve got these leads coming in, survey them… you want to understand, the demographics, who are they. You want to clarify what the pain points, like why did they sign up, were they just stupid and duped into it or did they really feel that something was valuable and what was it that they find most valuable.”
Approximate cost: $200

9. Create a sticky note roadmap: Write all of your company’s features on separate sticky notes and then group them in logical buckets. “What I do, is I put on the left side I put the most important group and then at the top, the most important features. So on the top left is the most important thing I have to do…When you have that roadmap in front of you, you can sort of visualize the one thing that flows through everything and usually there’s an unknown around that.”
Approximate cost: $100

10. Ghetto launch. Test the unknown. “Whatever you can find that can test out your core stuff that’s free…Identify the metrics, collect the data and validate…”
Approximate cost: $250

Source: Techcrunch

We all remember a good teacher from school who inspired us to achieve, or great boss who encouraged us to develop our skills. What happens if you’re now in a position where you have to train, manage or coach someone?  Well it’s worth knowing the differences between what a mentor and a coach is.

There are key differences between Mentoring and Coaching. First you have to understand the dynamics of what a coach or mentor will offer. Essentially they will be 6 key areas that one needs to look at which are:

1. Focus
2. Role
3. Relationship
4. Source of influence
5. Personal returns
6. Arena

With a mentor the focus is with the individual. The role is as facilitator with no agenda. The relationship is self respecting. The source of influence is Perceived value.  The personal returns are Affirmation/learning. The Arena is Life.

As a coach it is slightly different. With a coach the focus is with the performance. The role has a specific agenda. The relationship comes with the job. The source of influence is the position.  The personal returns are Teamwork/performance. The Arena is Task related.

To read more about the difference between a mentor and a coach visit  coachingandmentoring.com

This is a guest post by Rohit Khetan, Rohit has over 6 years experience working in tech leading Digital Media software development companies.

I have been reading various reports on social media lately and the numbers for corporate spend on social media are enormous. eMarketer projects spend on social media advertising to reach $4 bn next year emarketer. What is not so surprising is that 70% of the spend is on MySpace and Facebook. Given that network effects ensure that large networks get larger and more valuable, competition for advertising in social media is an almost zero sum game.

Almost every corporate right from Southwest Airlines to Starbucks has a Facebook, Twitter, Youtube account if for nothing else than just for announcing sales. It is a bit difficult to remember that a lot of these social media sites began as sites purely meant for social, personal interaction and were not intended to be sales channels (at least for those signing up initially).

For Facebook and Twitter to justify their extremely high valuations, they need to somehow turn their audience to valuable advertising fodder. Facebook did this early with corporate pages, business pages and Facebook ads. Facebook even went as far as creating a mess called community pages, which creates pages out of words in people’s profiles and then expects it to work like Wikipedia but with discussions. This was a plan perhaps to make Facebook more important for search engines and for businesses looking to spend on search traffic. Twitter took a more considered approach (more on that in a moment) and launched promoted tweets.

But where does this leave the users? Being constantly asked by ads and friends to fan a page or follow a company, they eventually will begin zoning out. A possible scenario is websites with too active a corporate presence might end up losing audience and eventually their cash cows as well. Twitter has tried to balance corporate advertising and user needs by only keeping ads which are ‘interacted with’ by users.

This trend is difficult to detect at this time as the sites generally report only topline increase in number of users. A metric which could track this is % change in number of users shifting from active to becoming passive to eventually exiting.

Given that the theme for the 18^th of August was the Web is dead , I think it might be a good time to discuss the possibility that current social media giants could eventually die due to internal problems rather than competition and the ones which survive would have managed to successfully balance their hunger for revenues with the demands of their ‘heart’ – their users. What do you think?

Interesting video by Rachel Botsman at TEDxSydney who talks about how technology is enabling trust between strangers. Goodbye Hyper-Consumption, hello ‘Collaborative Consumption’. In Rachel Botsman TEDxSydney talk, you learn how the internet is removing the middle man and making it possible to have a sustainable business plan selling peer-to-peer.

according to Nielsen African-Americans use the most voice minutes – on average more than 1,300 a month. Hispanics are the next most talkative group, chatting an average of 826 minutes a month.Even Asians/Pacific Islanders, with 692 average monthly minutes, talk more than Whites, who use roughly 647 voice minutes a month. African-Americans and Hispanics also text the most. Hispanics send and receive around 767 SMS messages a month while African-Americans send and receive around 780 – significantly more than Asians/Pacific Islanders (384 texts a month) and Whites (566 texts a month). The voice and text results are compiled from one year (April 2009-March 2010) of mobile usage data gathered by the The Nielsen Company, which analyzes the cellphone bills of more than 60,000 mobile subscribers each month in the United States.

Women Have Their Say
And if you think women in the U.S. talk more than men on their cellphones, Nielsen data confirms your suspicion. On average, women talk 22 % more than men (856.3 minutes a month compared to men’s 666.7). Turns out, American women are more communicative in general on mobile devices; they text more, too, sending or receiving an average of 601 SMS messages a month compared to the 447 monthly text messages sent or received by the average American male.

Teens Rule for Texting
Not surprisingly, teens text the most, sending or receiving an amazing 2,779 SMS messages a month. In the next two age brackets, text usage falls by more than half each time, with those aged 18-24 sending or receiving 1,299 messages and those aged 25-34 exchanging an average of 592 messages. While the text usage varies greatly between those 18-24 and those 25-34, their voice usage is quite close (981 voice minutes for 18-24 and 952 minutes a month for those 25-34 years old.)

Read the full article

This post is for those of you who are perhaps not so up to speed with all the major developments that are going on in the mobile and technology space. A few months ago Steve Jobs introduced what he described as something that would be able to give you “The emotion of TV. The interactivity of the web. The power of mobility. Introducing iAd.”

It all sounds fantastic in principle.  Apple says that iAd gives brands what they’ve been waiting for.  What’s that I hear you ask? Well for a start, how about access to the global audience of iPhone and iPod touch users, enhanced targeting, premium creative and robust measurement.

That’s their words not ours.  You have to give Apple credit though in terms of going where the money is. And where’s that? Well it’s search at the moment.  However Jobs says that you may use search on your desktop now, however on mobile it’s all about apps. People are not searching on their mobiles, they are using apps like yelp or qype to get data. This he suggests is where the opportunity lies for publishers and developers.

The big issue however with this opportunity is one that is currently present for most brands and that is one of interruption marketing. TV does a good job of this. Will the iAd solve this problem? Well since it’s announcement, there have been mixed reviews in the press. Only time will tell, however what is true, is that whatever Jobs seems to puts his hands to normally turns to gold.

So how does it work?

To find out more, you can download this PDF on how you can promote your app

Years ago the radio was the must have communication device of it’s day. Families would gather round to listen to the latest news about what was going. It was an essential comunication medium that would inform or educate users.  The question one has to ask now is, is radio, or radio communication dead?

To answer this, one needs to be clear as to how we as engaged consumers now consume our content. Communication years ago was fixed one way directional, whereas now it’s mobile, two-way, muti-way conversational. The way in which we now consume our content has changed as has the modes of communication. Is radio, or radio communication dead?  Yes and no. I think radio as we knew it is dead, however it is also very much alive and kicking if we are to believe that podcasts and online radio is the new communication tool. Sites like pandora.com or last.fm & spotify are now part of our everyday diet of top lists, music playlists, song selections. And it’s not just small startup companies who were and are looking into radio. Large companies like Google tried it.  however when Google entered the radio advertising business a few years ago now, they had grand ambitions, however, those ambitions soon faded to dust.

The company had planned to revolutionize the way radio ads were bought and sold. In 2006, Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive, said he foresaw a day when Google would have more than 1,000 employees serving a thriving radio advertising business. Unfortunately that never happened and Googles radio dreams where turned off.  So if radio is now online, on demand, what are the figures like?

Well the latest BBC radio statistics show that the Average weekly unique users for june was 3,529,403 with the Monthly live listening hours being 23,472,729. Is this good? Well, it’s not bad. Should brands still look to radio as an additional touch point. It depends, if radio can still give people what they want, when they want it, then the answer is yes. Do I still listen to the radio? Err Hellooo. Radio is soo last season.  But yes, becuase I’m getting older and like to listen to it.

Back in April 2010 we showed you the Sunday Times UK Rich list. Well if you were impressed by the regional differences in wealth, your going to be amazed at the global differences in wealth.

Below is a short list of some of the worlds billionaires. For those of you who can’t comprehend that amount here is what a billionaire care buy him or herself and still have change to play with.

Carlos Slim Helu: $53.5 billion - Telecom, Mexico.

Telecom tycoon who pounced on privatization of Mexico’s national telephone company in the 1990s becomes world’s richest person for first time after coming in third place last year.

Bill Gates: $53 billion - Microsoft, U.S.

Software visionary is now the world’s second-richest man. Net worth still up $13 billion in a year as Microsoft shares rose 50% in 12 months, value of investment vehicle Cascade swelled.

Warren Buffett: $47 billion - Investments, U.S.

America’s favorite investor up $10 billion in past 12 months on surging Berkshire Hathaway shares; says U.S. has survived economic “Pearl Harbor,” but warns recovery will be slow.

To see the rest of the worlds billionaires visit forbes.com for the original article.