Venture Creators Blog

According to an article published in the MIT Technology Review, 3 MIT scientists are working on a way to charge batteries without wires, using magnetic induction. This is something Nikola Tesla first theorized more than 100  years ago.
Pretty neat, but the real deal-killer may be in its applications, as one commenter points out:
I recall 2 earlier startups, Mobilewise and Splashpower, that […]

Forbes Entrepreneur has a new article dumbly named Crazy Twists On Ancient Technology, in which "non-revolutionary" inventions - also called "evolutionary" inventions or "improvements" are somewhat bashed in the head and labeled "crazy". WRONG. These "improvements" on a sometimes "ancient" technology are very frequently what makes a certain product or service a success. Check the […]

David Hornik of August Capital, a Silicon Valley VC, posted on his VentureBlog about the VC industry in Europe. David is highly critical of the European VC industry and he is rightly so: despite some progress, innovators that require financing have a much tougher time here in Europe than in the US.
Tornado Insider has, as usual, the […]

An interesting movement that has been bubbling up to the surface in the last few years is that of using movies to *really* educate.
Movies like The Insider (1999), Erin Brokovich (2000), Super Size Me (2004), Syriana (2005), Lord of War (2005)and more recently An Inconvenient Truth (2006) have an increasingly serious and dramatic tone, trying not only to […]

Reading Kathy Sierra’s always excellent blog posts, I stumbled into a discussion on the Usability of Business Cards. It is clear they are a critical business tool that has proved its value over and over again. Or has it?

Perhaps the cards you’ve designed and hand over aren’t that efficient at what they should do:
1. […]

In a fascinating post, Umair of BubbleGen defends that:
The bigger question the commoditization of strategy begs is this: what is the next great shift in value creation? What is the next great paradigm that will shape how the people that own resources - corporations, entrepreneurs, capitalists - think about how to create value from them?
I […]

From StartupJournal.com, The Wall Street Journal’s guide for entrepreneurs:
NEW YORK, July 18 /PRNewswire/ — For start-ups on a shoestring budget, the opportunity to gain widespread exposure at no cost may seem too good to be true, says StartupJournal.com, The Wall Street Journal’s guide for entrepreneurs. But networking sites like MySpace allow groups — including businesses […]

In It just doesn't matter 37signals advocate that you should only include on a product the features that really, REALLY are important. Everything else just doesn't matter. Clear examples and a track-record of success based on products that follow this philosophy, such as Basecamp (that we use here at the VCN for managing the VCN […]

According to Diego Rodriguez of metacool, the companies that really do it are the ones that manage to do routinely innovate, not create "special projects". Check Organizing for Routine Innovation for the full post on Honda's routine process.
Update: Juan Freire has an extensive comment on the article, most of it in Spanish.

A reverse approach to one of our main pillars here at the VCN - collborative business idea development through a trustable community - is introduced by Dorai’s LearnLog, in Blogs for Idea Mining.
Blogs are a great source of ideas. Some of the bloggers are the smartest people I know. They comment about products. […]