Last month we Launched Los Angeles Tech and in the announcement we provide the Hot List for the first half of January 2009. Top for January 16, 2009 - January 31, 2009 Posts Are You Selling Online Yet? The Scott Sanfilippo Interview Media Optimization Firms Are Red Hot In Southern California in 2009 Proliferate - Aggregate - Integrate Startups Uncensored #4 - “Finding and Working with Partners” SoCal VC’s absent This hot list is based on various social signals of what people are writing about, reading, bookmarking, searching, etc. You

thought we should take a moment to reflect on some of the awesomeness that came out of SXSWi 2009. Tags: Articles sxsw sxsw 2009 sxsw Most of Los Angeles is gearing up for this years SXSW Interactive and will be hitting the streets of Austin, Texas over the course of the next few days. I

Quite often the goal is to get them into an excel spreadsheet in a form that allows people to easily play with them. Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp, Sept 2009) View more documents from Dave McClure . What Dave McClure's presentation does is point to some additional metrics that are useful to think about and consider: A : Acquisition - where / what channels do users come from? A : Activation - what % have a "happy" initial experience? R : Retention - do they come back & re-visit over time? R : Referral - do they like it enough to

While the economy in 2009 looks challenging for most companies, the outlook of marketing executives is rather bright and upbeat. Deborah Kania and her team at Brightworks Interactive have just released results of their survey of marketing executives' plans for 2009. Here are nine marketing trends you can expect during 2009: The survey covered both B-to-B and B-to-C companies, as well as a mix of large, medium, and small businesses, so the survey results represent a good cross-section of marketers. Marketing Trend #1: Increased use of digital media and a decrease

I'm beginning my final preparation for my presentation at eLearn 2009. As I did for my keynote at ASTD TechKnowledge in January, I'm using what I described in Twitter Conference Ideas . Particularly I'm using TweetLater to plan out my presentation and hopefully provide value to participants and people who are not attending but who might be interested in what I'm presenting. The intent of this post is to simply alert you that I will be doing a series of tweets during my presentation that's scheduled for: Wednesday, October 28 - 8:30 AM, Pacific Time – Convert to Your Time Zone

I just had an all-too common conversation with the founder of a startup who had spent more than a year working with a software development company who had produced a mess. The mess really comes from a developer who was willing to get started on a product that was not fully thought out. I always take a very different approach in early conversations. If I’m being asked to do startup software development, I’m going

Just a quick note that I'll be moderating a Technology Council Event : Social Networking as a Business Strategy May 19, 2009 - Culver City Social networking media are used on a daily basis to grow businesses and expand career opportunities. Individuals use social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Plaxo as career-advancing tools, even more useful in a down economy. Corporations increasingly see social media as a key PR, communications and marketing medium.

This coming Monday, October 26, the Perfect Pitch 2009 Entrepreneur and Investor Conference is taking place at the Ritz Carlton. Details The Perfect Pitch 2009 Entreprenuer and Investor Conference - Hundreds of influential entrepreneurs and investors will converge for a full day of training and dealmaking. Date: Monday, October 26th, 2009 Sir Richard Branson is known for being a successful entrepreneur. Ten minutes alone with the guy could probably change your life if you used it correctly.

I recently had a conversation with an pre-launch startup where they discussed how SEO was going to be really important for them. They went on to describe a fairly common type of site that has some original content, but not much. They are in a space where there is lots of search traffic, but they didn't have anything particularly interesting to say about how they were going to get ranked. This isn't the first time I've had this same conversation.

I did a presentation about the use of Social Media to a great group of people who mostly are different kinds of service professionals (attorneys, accountants, consultants, etc.). I promised that I would do a follow-up post with some thoughts out of the presentation and providing links. This is that post. Value of Blogging I started the presentation talking about the value of blogging.