Category Archives: funding

Startup Weekend Hits SXSW 2010

Startup Weekend and Piryx are working on the 2nd Annual Piryxtopia Charity Bash – this is your chance to donate 20 bucks and get tickets to meet up with Startup Weekend and Pyrix. This also ties into the idea of doing startup support in Haiti via We Hear Your Voice.

You need to go here http://314.piryx.com and register for the event. You will be asked for a donation. You also need to pick up a handy identification card that will be available at SXSW at supporter booths that will found throughout the SXSW event. You can hit their Facebook page to get a direct map of where all the booths and people are that will have one of the lodge cards for you to get involved. They state:

In order to attend this event, guests must pick-up a Piryx 314 card beforehand. These cards will be circulating during the first 2 days of SXSW and can be obtained through any Piryx, or Startup Weekend employee. Cards will be also available through supporters and booths scattered around SXSW. Join our Facebook Event Page to learn about who and where these folks are. The cards must be registered in advance, which will automatically put your name on the list for the party. A $20 donation to We Hear Your Voice is the suggested entry price for the event – there will be a $5 discount if you tweet out a message with the hashtag “Pi4Haiti”, and show it to the person giving out the cards. Source: Piryx.com

If you are going to SXSW, this is one event that has many benefits, meet the right people who sponsor startups like Startup Weekend, hook up with Piryx for corporate giving and help the folks in Haiti. Of course all of this is going to even cooler when Startup Weekend goes down to Haiti to help startups get off the ground once the internet is back up and running. Right now the main lines are still down as the major internet points were taken out during the earthquake. Right now everyone is on Sattelite communications, but there are teams down there now helping the country at least get the internet back up and running.

When Startup Weekend announces the event for Haiti – look for that news here. In the mean time help everyone get back up on their feet, do the donation and support Startup Weekend, Piryx and Haiti.

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Amazon sees renewed pressure to collect State Sales Tax

Amazon and other online retailers like EBay might not be able to dodge the tax collection business for much longer as States try increasingly to find new areas of revenue. Over the last couple of weeks, both Colorado and California have started passing legislation in one form or another that will mean that Amazon will have to seriously work on collecting sales tax.

Amazon, EBay and its myriad rivals have all had a very long free ticket about not collecting state sales tax. Although Washington State people who order off of Amazon pay Washington State Sales tax on a regular basis, Colorado, California and other states are back on the “collect state sales tax” bandwagon again this year. Last year Amazon and many other companies banded together to help stop the process. But as the recession drags on into its second year, cash strapped states are looking at online sales tax as one way of digging themselves out of a deficit or not have to cut back any further on critical support programs.

This is a double edged sword for many of the companies doing business online. For more than 10 years sales on internet purchased items have been free of many of the taxes that we pay when we go to the physical store. This has been a huge competitive advantage over the local corner bookshop or the larger brick and mortar operations like Barnes and Nobel as well as Boarders. Add to that the advent of market pricing on books down to a penny, it is often very easy to find a brand new hard cover book going for one cent on Amazon, that even with the 3.99 dollar postage that a person pays makes the entire sales tax argument moot. What is 8.5% of 1 penny? You would have to sell 100 penny books to make 8.5 cents in sales taxes. This is not the way to dig a state coffer out of a fiscal deficit, 8.5 cents does not go very far at all.

This does not include the regularly priced books, but competition is fierce on Amazon, EBay and other systems like Alibris who will all end up collecting sales tax on deeply discounted items. It would be interesting to see what this move actually adds to the state budget because odds are highly likely that when states go and do their price comparisons they are pulling the normal suggested retail price and not taking into account that almost everything on any ecommerce site is so deeply discounted that actual state revenues are going to be minimal at best.

Taxing the sales though online is fair and probably an idea well past its time. Although this might dent online sales, it will not for long because the long term damage is already done to the local marketplace. The corner bookstore is dead. Many of the Mom and Pop operations who did not or could not go onto the internet or did not start selling deeply discounted items on Amazon, EBay, Alibris, or the host of other sites is already gone. People have no place but Wall-mart for some items where they will pay state sales tax. Other items are only available online; they just are not available in the brick and mortar world. In the end, shoppers will still find deep discounts online; they just might have to pay tax on it for a change. At least the sales tax will be on the final value of the product, and not on the full price value that the states are probably basing their tax estimates on.

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Youth Venture Seattle gets broken into needs a little holiday help

City of Seattle
Image via Wikipedia

This is a Techwag PSA – Youth Venture Seattle is one of the very few organizations that are trying to help kids at an early age learn to think innovatively, have some awesome experiences along the way, and become the leaders that we will need in this country tomorrow and today.

The cool part about Youth Venture is that they are building a global movement of young kids and change makers by investing in teams of young people to design and launch their own sustainable ventures. They will provide coaching, resources, mentors, resources and initial seed funding for great ideas up to 1,000 dollars. Much like many of the other startups and startup support groups here in Seattle, this one is directly aimed at kids with great ideas, but no ability or money to pursue them. $1,000 dollars seed money might not sound like a lot, but in this case it works, kids really do succeed with a small amount of seed funding, in often interesting and surprising ways.

Unfortunately Youth Venture Seattle was broken into over the weekend and need a little help replacing the gear that was stolen. According the Meaghan over at Youth Ventures the following was stolen:

The theft included all five of our work laptops (which included valuable programs like Adobe Creative Suite), one personal laptop, and a projector that we use for programming purposes. We’re a small team–there are just five of us here–so a loss like this will result in a sweeping change in infrastructure, operations, and budgeting until we can slowly but surely get back on our feet. While the theft of the laptops was a large financial blow, we are also facing the impact of losing copious amounts of work, information, and data, most of which was backed up amongst the six computers.

If you are feeling like helping them out please go visit their site (they have a donation board up) or hit up their contact e-mail to see how you can help. No sense in having them set back because they were broken into. If you are interested in learning more about them please visit this link.

So far they have raised a little over 4K, but they could use more to help them replace the systems that were stolen. Thank you much for reading, and if you can help out, this is a great place to do it.

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AT and T starts blaming customers for downloading too much

Image representing iPhone as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

Usually the first rule of business is that the customer is right always. Well maybe not so much according to AT&T, especially when it comes to the Iphone and data “hogs”. While unlimited plans usually mean unlimited, it looks like unlimited is soon going to mean caps, and extra charges for well, using your unlimited plan in an unlimited way.

I can’t think of a better reason for Apple to start seriously evaluating the impact that back end services to the Iphone and its popularity are going to have in the future. While I refuse to purchase an Iphone until it is on the Verizon network, Apple needs to start taking a look at what AT&T is doing not just to itself, but in the longer run everyone who purchases a smart internet capable phone through them. Blackberry and Android should also be seriously looking at all the cell carriers and working out the best strategy to sell more gear. Customer satisfaction is going to depend on the networking services that are being paid for and provided.

I can’t think of a better time for Apple to step out of it’s exclusivity deal with AT&T and let me (and probably thousands of others who love Verizon) purchase and Iphone and join the modern age. When the service carrier blames a small percentage of users for their issues (much like Comcast and other ISP’s did with Bittorrent and now Streaming Media) of providing an even service across the network, we all know what is coming next. AT&T has been open about it, data caps, and probably bandwidth shaping to go along with that, dropping high volume users in the middle of whatever they were doing.

The AT&T chief also held out the possibility of pricing changes that could promote changes in how customers use data. One positive step AT&T could take would be to help users understand how much data they are using and how their own usage compares to other users. Many in the top 3 percent probably have no idea their data usage is way above average, and might cut back if they knew. Source: PC World

If this is true and the top 3% will care the service issues they are causing others (Comcast had to go into bandwidth shaping and connection resetting to get people’s attention on their cable network for the same problem) in the longer run then that will be good. The problem is that educating users who bought an unlimited data plan and use it in an unlimited manner will go “meh”. It is a good intention, but most likely to fail, meaning this is the time that Apple needs to go on the offensive to make sure that the Iphone does not end up in the land of misfit toys because AT&T can’t deliver.

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Note to Conference Organizers Keep in touch with people

Carrier Pigeon
Image via Wikipedia

Over a number of conferences I have been at lately, one of the hallmarks of all of them was what could I do for them rather than what I would learn from the conference. Once the marketing folks realized that I would not provide them with anything, it is like we no longer exist. Reminder to marketing folks – there is always next year and I have budget control.

The worst mistakes that I have seen with conference marketing folks is that as long as they think they can get something from you, they want to be your best friend. When the reality sets in that I really can’t sponsor the conference this year and I am lucky to attend because times are tough and I paid my own way to your conference that these same marketing people seem to forget all about you. I have standing invites to meet with marketing folks from two different conferences now that we have budgeted to help sponsor next year, but try to get them on via e-mail, social networking, or even carrier pigeon, POTS, or anything else it is like we just simply do not exist anymore.

Marketing and especially conference organizers need to be cultivating contacts in the local community, and just because a sponsor cannot make it one year does not meant that they will not make it the next year. Budget cycles are long and uncertain, if you want to make sure that the sponsorship will at least be budgeted for, and then you have to keep the contacts fresh and snappy. That means being available and answering questions, expectations, and what the message should be between the sponsor and the conference organizer.

This is a massive Fail on the part of two conferences that we were planning on sponsoring. This is what makes those personal contacts so important; if you do not keep them up to date then they go away. Conferences especially need to keep the long horizon open and keep up with people who could and can sponsor the conference to ensure that the money is budgeted and available when the conference happens.

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