However, Fortune has just announced that Corvallis is the 48th best place to “Live and launch a company in 2008.“  I have known some great companies to be founded, created, and launched in Corvallis, but wow I just am still not used to seeing Corvallis mentioned in a financial magazine like Fortune.

To see that Seattle is not even on the list seems a little crazy to me.  Especially with Bellevue being names the number 1 city on the list!  Bellevue is a great city if you’re into living in the ‘burbs, but it just seems that Seattle is such a better city for finding and keeping the young tech savvy workers happy.  Other notable cities in the Northwest, Portland (#6), Bellingham (#26), Eugene (#96, Yes, the Beavers win).

HT: John Cook’s Blog

Fortune Article

However, over the last few weeks I have come to realize that twitter is not only a powerful tool for communicating online and via your cell phone, but that it is also a much better way of getting you casually connected with alot of people who you would not meet or become friends with on facebook. Most of the people who I “follow” on Twitter, I have never met in person, and would not consider them my friends. I follow Ben Bernanke, Jim Cramer, Guy Kawasaki, and that is just a few of the people I follow that I otherwise would have no “access” to in the real world, or even meaningful contact with on Facebook.

The reason that I am now enjoying twitter is that I have started to follow people who are smarter and more connected than I am, as well as the few actual friends I do have on twitter. I now get interesting articles sent my way, keep in the know about web/tech happenings, and get to see what some of the smartest most succesful people in the tech industry are working on and thinking about. I don’t follow anybody that starts following me and this helps keep my feed down to a managable ammount of information that I consistantly find interesting.

If you’re on twitter, or join, let me know!

After the jump a good video by Gary Vaynerchuk, one of the guys who I am really enjoying following on twitter, on why facebook needs to adapt or get passed by twitter. A good take, and if you head over to his site check out his other videos there is some good stuff in there.

Calacanis posted a great post about money saving tips for a startup. His ideas include

• Buying lunch for the team and having meetings over lunch- Save time and not have other meetings.
• Buy Mac’s- more expensive up front, but save money on IT.
• Buy second monitors- makes people more productive and happy.
• Don’t buy a phone system- Most people can use cell phones, only buy phones for the people on them all the time.
• Buy the hardest working people computers from home so that they can work at home and on their own time.
• Get an expensive automatic espresso machine and keep it fully stocked with milks, nice beans, and syrups.
• Don’t waste money on PR or recruiters.

and the one that has created all of the publicity around the web…

• “Fire people who are not workaholics…. come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. go work at the post office or stabucks if you want balance in your life. For realz.”

I thought the list was a great starting point on where to save money, and keep productivity up in a startup. I was going to blog about the article when I first read it, but before I got around to blogging about it TechCrunch attacked Calacanis with a post titled “Calacanis Fires People Who Have a Life.” Pulled a few quotes out of the post and basically slammed Calacanis for the last quote. As Calacanis later put it in a follow up post, that headline sure sounds like it’s out of the valley’s gossip blog, Valleywag.

So the questions is; Can you have a life and work at a startup? I think that you definitely can. I think that you need to work more than 40 hours a week at a startup and be very flexible in the hours that you work, but I don’t think you need to give up on the rest of your life either. I think that you can work 60 hours plus a week and still have a life. It seems like you can be a “workaholic” if you want to call it that, yet still have a balanced life. So many people want to say that if you work more than 40 you’re forgetting about the rest of your life and I just don’t think it’s that simple. It’s totallt dependend on how much you enjoy your work and how you’re able to change between your personal life and your work life.

Can you work more than 40 hours a week and have a life? 60 hours? When is it too much?

Also, any thoughts on Calacanis’ money saving tips? If I were to create a small startup I think I would take the majority of them to heard. Not because of him, but because I’ve been a part of the startup and I think that these could really work.

Calacanis’ How to Save Money Running a Startup

TechCrunch: Calacanis Fires People Who Have a Life

Calacanis’ response: Can you have a life and work at a startup company?

Since the iPhone is less than a year old and already has gained a large market share it seems like a hot product with alot of room for growth, both on its platform and in the consumers hands (on their ears?). Apple has announced that they will be controlling ALL application sales through their iPhone Apps Store. This will allow them to make that all apps have been approved by Apple and that they are malicious, or porn, or anything like that. It will also make sure that Apple gets a cut of each application that is sold (30%). They have however, allowed each developer the freedom to charge whatever they want for the applications they have developed, even if it is free. This store, the platform, and what appears to be the ease of development for these applications seems to be reason enough to build an application, but Apple seems to think it needs more.

So the iFund will help developers get up and going and get their ideas funded to develop iPhone applications. I just don’t understand what the exit strategy for these companies will be though. Other than Apple acquiring them I just don’t see another exit strategy. Seems like a great deal for Apple, but not a great deal for Kleiner Perkins or the developers who take funding. Although Kleiner Perkins is generaly viewed as one of the top VC firms in the industry, so maybe I’m just young and don’t understand the business well enough yet.

Tech Crunch wrapup

Well this weekend I read about my new favorite exchange that I really hope takes off.  Yoonew, is an exchange for sports tickets, that is focusing for now on Super Bowl 42 tickets.  This is a great way for fans to potentially get tickets to watch their teams in big games, at a fraction of the costs.  For example, I can buy tickets to watch the Seahawks (if they make it) in this years Super bowl, for about half the price of face value and exponentially cheaper than the after market value.  However, if the Hawks were not to make it to the Super Bowl, I would be out a few hundred dollars.  You can also buy futures for tickets and still make money if the prices of tickets were to go down.

I think this is a phenomenal business idea and with fans always feeling more optimistic about their team, than the odds actually are, this will lead to alot of trading if the business can get to a critical mass.  It can also lead to an affordable way for people to experience dream events.  I hope the word spreads and this exchange takes off, because everyone wins, as opposed to only a select few ticket brokers winning at this time.

Tech Crunch Story

What if I could get the news on my iPod each morning before I wanted to run.  What if I could get the right ammount of information on there, so that I don’t have to miss out on the last 10 minutes of the news when I get home and want to get ready.  Here’s the idea:

You create a network of news tidbits.  You break the news down into as small as segments as you can ie, news about each different sports team is broken down into 30 second clips and therefore rather than having to listen to 2 minutes worth of information I don’t care about, I just choose which teams or sports I want to hear about.  The same can be done with weather, local news, world news, business news, really anything.  The information is then broken down into very specific 15 second- to 1 minute clips and you select which items you want downloaded, and how long you want the podcast to be.  The program then selects the items you want and creates a news station that is just for you and only has the news you want on it. 

Each morning the podcast is automatically downloaded to your iPod and all you have to do is grab your iPod and run! 

Who knows you could even include some encouragement on there from sponsored partners.  Also, I bet you could play ads to help with the revenue.  People would put up with some ads, just as long as it wasn’t more than say 30 seconds per 10 minutes or so.  Plus the web portal where you select your news can have ads.  Maybe you could charge a small fee as well.  The details can be worked out later.  For now,  who wants to help me build this? :)

For people like myself this widget is great, because I can install it myself and I don’t have to do anything more than cut and paste.  No signup, no double checking if it works, just past and publish and you’re good to go.

Nice work Mark. 

Truemors has since launched a Facebook application, and now to help with the spread of the app. Kawasaki is offering a signed copy of his book to the first 200 people who install the app., invite friends, post some "truemors" and send him an email.  At first I laughed at the notion of Guy using his book, his autograph, and his tech celebrity to help spread Truemors on Facebook, but when I thought about it I figured it is a great idea.  Imagine the 200 people who get books sign up, they invite 10 friends each, they have a 20% success rate.  Those people invite a few friends, soon you will have 10’s if not 100’s of thousands of people who will have at least seen one friend join truemors in their news feed.  Not bad.  Now lets hope I was in the first 200 and get my autographed copy of The Art of the Start.

It’s to late, and I can’t put together coherent sentences so I will link to a few roundups of the event.

Redfin’s blog

John Cook’s blog

Hopefully there will be another one of these, even if it’s smaller, before the end of the summer.

I’m not just trying to link to a bunch of sites, but that is five stories on social networks, four of which seem to be very significant (TripUp doesn’t seem like a major move).  How are all of these social networks going to function?  I think Facebook is great, but there is no way that I will get onto MySpace or any other social network unless it reaches a very large critical mass of my friends or colleagues.  Ning, which provides a very easy to use tool for creating your own mini social networks is a great tool (I’ve used it and love it), but how much can a bunch of social networks of only a few hundred people be worth?  $214M?  I have a hard time believing that they really can bring in that much revenue on what they currently have (although with $44M I’m sure there will be some changes coming down the pipe).  Yahoo, I don’t think they’ll be able to provide anything to draw a large group of new users and they’re current users only use them for email, finance, and fantasy sports. 

Google could potentially launch a very appealing social network for businesses.  By tying together, gmail, gchat, spreadsheets, docs and their new powerpoint killer, it seems they could provide an open network for conducting business across offices or even companies.  Ping someone in the network through your hosted email in gmail and setup a live conference demo through gchat and the powerpoint killer program.  It sounds very appealing to me and I hope they go down this road.  I think it’s the only play left for social networks, because really, how many places do people like to write their favorite songs and activities.

Can all of these companies be worth this much money and become sustainable products?  Competition is great, but I think it will come down to Facebook, MySpace, Ning, and if Google goes after the business crowd with their integrated online applications they could take alot of customers away from Facebook and LinkedIn.  It will be a fun next 18 months.

[Sorry if I got carried away, but that was 4 big stories on the same subject in the same day]