start-ups

Do watch this video that shows a really innovative development in the US to create new products and services for older people.

Aging2.0 has its headquarters at the Institute on Aging in San Francisco. What is so brilliant about this is that they have collocated their start-up incubator in a building used by older people.

On day 4 of our Blogger Bus Tour, we met with Carlos Diaz, the CEO and founder of Kwarter and Guillaume de Cugis, CEO and co-founder of Scoop’it, two French entrepreneurs who left their country in order to take their venture to the next level and … change the world! (this post was originally written for the Live Orange Blog)

Duncan Logan, founder of Rocketspace is originally Scottish and moved to San Francisco some time ago. His first venture didn’t work but 20 months ago, he then decided to found Rocketspace. Rocketspace could be described as “offices as a service” Logan said. He confided to our team of bloggers that he had read the Lean Start-up and he tested the principles he’d found in the book by creating a fake company and posting an ad on Craigs’ list.

The Moneyball strategy – which emphasizes a sophisticated understanding of data and statistics to help small budget baseball teams compete with their higher-spending rivals – holds a number of important lessons for the world of business. At a time when companies are finding that they must do more with less, Big Data – the massive amounts of unstructured data that Web users create every day with their Internet-connected devices - could be a source of competitive advantage for smaller businesses.

If you work in either an agency, consultancy or professional services firm, then you've likely seen an article or five over the past few years making the case for agencies to act more like start-ups. The logic goes something like this: start-ups are nimble and product focused.

Fred Wilson tells the story in this extraordinary post of how his investment company, Union Square Ventures, missed the opportunity to invest in Airbnb, one of my favourite peer-to-peers. At the time, the founders had ideas but the service was still a marketplace for air mattresses on people's floors. It was, he says, the classic investor's mistake of focusing too much on what the business were doing at the time and "not enough on what they could do, would do, and did do".