A clean(er) website, with easy navigation, and a handy design tool to create your own design. 100 buttons were $40 bucks and they can get them ready to go in less than 48 hours with overnight shipping.

Bookmark this site, you never know when you might need buttons – fast!

“Online job marketplace Elance has just announced it will give $1 million to The Startup America Partnership, the national campaign that aims to accelerate entrepreneurship, which is chaired by Steve Case, co-founder of AOL disclosure: TechCrunch parent and Chairman of the Case Foundation.”

via Elance To Give $1 Million To Startup America Partnership | TechCrunch.

I will need to evaluate The Startup America Partnership but as I’ve stated before, I firmly believe technology and small businesses especially startups are one of the few bright stops in America with the ability to spur innovation, create jobs, and keep us great.

The first iteration of this project will launch in the next couple of weeks. I’ve put together a great support network of experienced startup execs and founders for veterans to get advice and introductions (after being vetted, of course).

Long term, I would like to develop a curriculum for Vets to learn how to code that would combine on-the-job training with leading technologist, online learning such as Codecademy, and traditional course work at a local college or university. Software engineering and tech companies are some of the few silver linings in the economy. I truly believe entrepreneurs and small business owners are the answer to long term economic growth. Taking demographics who are otherwise limited in career path and providing training, education, advice, and resources is a win-win.

This looks like a cool idea, which I am going to try out for myself:

Still Looking For A New Year’s Resolution? How About Learning To Code … | TechCrunch.

I find myself on a regular basis telling my friends and colleagues to use DocuSign. Why? Well, it is simple. I detest the process of receiving a document, reviewing it, sending back proposed changes, getting the final version, printing it, signing it, scanning it, reattaching the document to an email, sending, and have the other party do the same process until they finally send the executed document back.

DocuSign streamlines this whole process. Their console is easy to use and is intuitive. I love services where I don’t have to muck around trying to figure how to use them. I have used DocuSign for dozens of contracts and agreements. It literally has saved me hours of time each month – which I appreciate as a Startup CEO. And best of all, they are mobile friendly. I have signed some very important documents on my iPhone (no app required) while on the move. DocuSign is well worth the monthly cost – go and check them out if you also detest the manual paper signing / scanning process.

BunchBall – Great demo by Kevin Spier, Director of Sales. Bunchball has a mature tool set and has been around since 2005. They have  many well known clients such as Comcast, Victoria’s Secret, and NBC. I was quite impressed by their capabilities and analytics.  It’s rare that service providers surpass my expectations but BunchBall did. BunchBall is backed by Granite Ventures and Adobe Systems Incorporated. The downside is that their current pricing model reflects their targeted clientele. Bunchball has a set pricing model in the mid 4 figures per month for up to 1MM unique visitors. All in all, a great value for established customers who have the budget to drive traffic to their site in a meaningful way – because let’s face it, gamification works if properly implemented. Kevin was quite helpful and introduced me to several of his connections who are interested in the space of my new venture.

BigDoor – Good demo by Keith Smith, CEO of BigDoor. BigDoor recently scored a $5MM venture round led by the Foundry Group, so they are playing catch up in some ways to the more established BunchBall. They have a toolset that will be able to get me the gamification features I desire, albeit with more massaging from my own development team than BunchBall. One plus about this is that BigDoor provides their technology more like an open source library so I can customize the features to fit my needs.  Keith also has been quite helpful and BigDoor has a huge advantage for two reasons: First, I, too, am a Seattle based startup CEO, so I am biased towards supporting local businesses and startups and Second, their pricing model, while based on API calls, scales with my business. This is an almost unarguable advantage for a cash-strapped startup and ultimately led towards our choice to go with BigDoor.

Do yourself a favor if you need to drive traffic and participation to your site and check out these two Companies, both offer superior value-added services.

Stay tuned to hear about my journey in the Seattle startup space and the interesting people and companies I meet.

Dan Hall

I am always intrigued with companies using technology to improve processes so I decided to take a deeper look at Qworky’s website to see if they had a demo or more information about how they actually plan on help me have better meetings. Here’s what I found out:

1. “Easy to access agendas ensures your meeting tells for years to come. ” Mmm. Okay.

2. “A shared central location for meeting information means Qworky reduces email overhead, all while integrating email for clients and colleagues who live and breathe their inbox. ” Gotcha, central meeting location online.

3. “By incorporating positive cues proven to increase collaborative participation, Qworky Meetings is your ultimate brainstorm companion. Bring Qworky to the Table and the Ideas will follow.”  Apparently, you haven’t met some of the people I sit with in meetings.

And that’s all they’re sharing. Fortunately, the meeting preview they used at NWEN is still available here. You can also go to their preview site and register to set up your own test meeting. It was pretty straight forward. Below is the end result.

So, here the problem. You are asking me to use another artificial process (Qworky) to better another artificial process (the meeting). I assume, eventually, you will even ask me to pay for it. It looks much like a B2C play which is a difficult play when tackling processes within organizations. You may get some adopters here or there but more than likely there will be significant obstacles for widespread use.

I like startups, I like them a lot. I also like to see them tackling cool issues like making meetings better. For that, I wish Qworky luck.

Dan Hall

Dean was always pushing the company forward; he is amazingly passionate and loved VT. Many of our biggest deals started with Dean “hunting elephants.” In my opinion, he was the heart of Visible Technologies.

Dean, I wish you the best.

Dan Hall