Top Startup

Im biking across the United States

I’m going biking… for the next couple of months.

It has been a long time coming. I first publicized this trip in October, 2007 and have been preparing since.

Topstartup won’t be updated, but watch and support our trip as we cross the US at: bikeacrossthe.us

Thanks for reading!
Colin

Popularity: 6% [?]

Location is the web’s new frontier 2.0

Where are you tweeting? Where are you blogging? Where was that picture taken? Where are your friends?

It’s a big world out there and location is an axis on which everyone is dying to slice you up.

You don’t have to be on the terrorist watch list to get value putting your location online. I’ve picked my horse and it’s Fire Eagle.

There are a bunch of other horses for storing your location. They are irrelevant. Everyone else wants to trap “where” in a walled garden. Fire Eagle allows developers to create applications around providing your location. I’m using Navizon on my iPhone to update Fire Eagle. Fire Eagle also allows developers to create applications that utilize your location. Dan Choi helped me build the map to the right using Fire Eagle ->.

Why should I tell Twitter where I am and Google Maps where I am. I want to tell Fire Eagle where I am and let Fire Eagle tell everyone else - at the level of granularity I choose.

Developers take notice: Support fire eagle for location based services or you are a second tier web 2.0 app.

Popularity: 8% [?]

good2gether wins Audience Choice award at Web Inno

Last night I attended the Web Innovators Group, Boston. Our client, good2gether presented as one of three “main dish” presenters. Im thrilled for good2gether and thrilled for Virosity. We won the Audience Choice award!

After months of working on good2gether, it’s exciting to have several hundred industry peers voting (by cell phone) for the product we (Virosity and good2gether) built!

• Web Innovators Group
• Greg McHale’s (CEO of good2gether) blog

Popularity: 7% [?]

What do women want on the interwebs

I attended a talk at Harvard tonight by Lisa Stone of BlogHer entitiled “What Women Want”. Much of the time was focused on what women don’t want. This made her seem angry. Angry at the world for marginalizing women on the internet. Angry at Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for not doing an interview on camera with BlogHer (a lot of time was focused here). Im not sure what made her so angry, but it was a little offputting. She did throw in some great stats about how women are using the net.

Steve Garfield captured the event, so check out his 20 minute video if you’re curious.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Where am I blogging now?

Topstartup has been sparse recently. Not necessarily because I am not blogging, more because I am really busy and blogging elsewhere:

Work

• Virosity blog - the blog for my employer
• good2gether product blog - the blog about new releases of good2gether, our current project

Fun

• bikeacrossthe.us - the blog (work in progress) about the upcoming cross country bike trip
• colin.nederkoorn.co.uk - my tumble log. Short blog posts and cool things I come across on the web. This is the one place that aggregates everything I do on the interwebs, including this site.

Not to say that I won’t be spending my time writing articles for Top Startup. I intend to post now more when I have something meaningful to say, rather than to keep to a schedule.

Popularity: 10% [?]

I’ll be attending ROFLcon

… because entrepreneurs need to have fun too! ROFLcon is a conference all about internet culture and memes. Last night I cracked. I bit the bullet and signed up while at a bar on my iPhone. If you have no idea about these types of things, you’ve probably missed out on the following: Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 9% [?]

Email Etiquette for dummies

The father of an old girlfriend of mine and I were discussing email etiquette. He is the President of a large pharmaceutical company. I asked him how he dealt with the volume of email that I assumed he received.

He told me that he asks people to follow a few simple rules when sending him email. These seem obvious, but Im amazed at how many people don’t know them. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 11% [?]

Yet another good reason not to use stock images

Thanks ben for this one!

Popularity: 9% [?]

A good reason not to use stock images in your website.

Don’t you hate it when you see someone wearing the same shirt as you? It’s equally frustrating seeing the same image used in a website template. If only I had time to create my own cool silhouette businessmen.

Popularity: 9% [?]

My couch is in Christian Science Monitor

Some how I made it in there too! The article is on coworking, a practice I highly recommend for getting you out of the house and into a social environment. If anyone gets CSM in print, I’d love to get a physical copy of the article to put on the wall at betahouse

Popularity: 9% [?]