Startup & the Internet

The Internet is not to be ignored by any business startup. It should be used to your advantage as soon as you decide to become an entrepreneur. You will be needing it to suck up information in every function of your business.

Your website and blogs are vital

Your business presence of the Web must be a priority. Even if you're not going to use a website for direct sales, it will be a key part of your promotion, branding and recognition. It will even be hard at work while you sleep.

If you are in business and do not have a Web presence, you will be automatically assigned second rank status. It is no longer possible to be in business successfully and not be there. Above all, the Internet is going to save you money and put you on a level playing field with established businesses.

Marketing your website ranks as being as of great an importance to success as the quality of your website itself. Fine to creat a work of art, but what is the value of it languishing in the studio?

Your blog will enable you to update information concerning your business in an immediate manner; you can solicit instant feedback to help you to refine your offer. But beware, people are commenting about you on other blogs. So you will need to monitor what they say. One route is via Technorati which is a blog search engine. Another very easy way to do it is via Google Reader; there your can enter the word of interest and see the range of websites and blogs that are relevant.

The real-time web

Real-time information delivery is fast emerging as one of the most important elements of online experience. Real-time content marks an important new phase of evolution in the web, allowing for the instantaneous discovery of newly added information. The difference between the 'now' web and the 'then' web is like the difference between getting the latest 'gen' chatting around the water cooler, by comparison with getting information from staff manuals or inter-office memos.

If you think of it as a river of information and you are just one swimmer at one point in the river, you will understand how difficult it is to make sure you know what's going on at any one time. Hence a rash of new services about which it is important to know. TweetDeck, for example, is a personal browser for staying in touch with what’s happening now, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook and more. It shows you everything you want to see at once, to stay organized and up to date. I can find my own blog posts and tweets there.

Or there's Aardvak that enables a real conversation with a friend (or friend-of-friend) that can be much more helpful than searching the web — all the knowledge and experience in people’s heads can’t be put on a web page and Aardvark can figure out who might be able to answer, and asks on your behalf. Topsy Labs is a new kind of search engine that sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy sees people in every community connected in a web of relationships, where each person influences other people to read, talk and think about things.

Information gathering shortcut

Getting hold of information is a snap—market data, statistics, legal provisions, competitor activity, prospect profiles, annual reports & accounts... the list is endless. Even if you don't know where to look, you have the general and specialist search engines at your fingertips.

If you're using a good browser you can have direct access to many different search sources right on your desktop. Many add-ons will give you amazing functionality, such as feeds to your browser bar, alternative search engines to choose with a click, web developer tools...

Not only use it for information gathering but the Internet is gathering pace on free learning materials. One of the best I know is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Sloan School of Management which offer all kinds of amazing free courseware. Even if you don't take the courses you can download pdfs of course materials for free.

OpenCourseWare is another exciting concept: an OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration (including MIT) of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.

Easy viewing can be had at YouTube Edu. This is a startling resource for learning just about anything from hundreds of US partner universities. Take a browse. Or Academic Earth Knowledge—where there over 800 videos on entrepreneurship.

Then there's FlatWorld Knowledge ($8 million in VC funding) with loads of management and entrepreneurship stuuf. Their books are free online, or softcovers are under $30, and tehere are audio books and chapters, self-print options. The books are the hub of a social learning network where students learn from the book and each other.

Sharing

Of course you know about file sharing, the means of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multi-media (audio, video), documents, or electronic books. Limewire is an open source and free service, for example. It allows you to share groups of files with your contacts, or create a list of files just for your friends.

Even better is drop.io which you can use to privately share your files and collaborate in real time by web, email, phone, mobile, and more. Create each drop in two clicks and share what you want, how you want, with whom you want.

What about sharing the amazing things you find on the web? One of the latest amazing gadhets is Jing that can vapture shots of all or parts of webpages and videos (up to five minutes. You can annotate what you capture and send them off in emails, save the file or upload them to your Facebook or other networking sites.

Free resources

In addition, the Internet is going to give you access to untold numbers of free tools for almost every function of your business to be. You will be amazed at what you can get for finance, marketing, sales, computing, Web design and more. Free Web-based and Open Source Business Tools lists more than 100 of them.

There are those who suggest that small-business owners need to decide how much Internet surfing they'll permit on company computers, and they need to make clear to employees what the limits are. I feel that policing is not the way to go. If your working environment is good, employees will make good decisions. The same applies to you. Surfing can often yield amazingly useful results, serendipitously.

I learned a vital lesson from Philip, one of my earliest bosses. We had a major presentation that lasted till late into the evening. The following day I felt justified in arriving late for work. On my arrival, he fired me. Happily we resolved the issue in discussion and I was reinstated, but this lesson about about responsibility endured.

Connecting

The Internet is a tool for making connections. It should be highly valued for this alone. No matter what the activity, communicating via the Net can save huge amounts of time and cost. The most impressive new product is the business networking site for collaborative working: Dimdim where meetings start with a single click in a web browser. No software is required to host, join, even record a Dimdim Web conference—take a look!

This can be done through networking sites, participation in forums, message and bulletin boards and lists concerned with subjects of interest or concern to you. As you discover more, you may want to look into the book, Smart Start: How Entrepreneurs and Corporations Can Profit by Starting Online Communities.

If you want to check out different alternative networking sites, including the well-known ones, then take a look at the the Directory of Online Network/Social Software Companies. You will also find a mass of helpful stuff in the book, The Virtual Handshake. If you want to build your own, The Community Girl works with organizations, companies and individuals to build, manage, activate and monetize their online communities. Another good piece on the Art of Networking is by Beth Anderson; she focuses on Internet forums—.

As well as social networking on sites like LinkedIn, Ryze or Xing, you can you can draw others towards you by writing your own blog and receiving comments, or responding to posts on blogs written by others, or set up a discussion list, at Google or Yahoo, for example.

Keeping track of all your Internet Usernames and Passwords: There are two very useful ways of keeping track of all the usernames and passwords that you create—one is a computer widget (for Mac users) and the other and old fashioned paper and pencil one (for all users). The widget is called Key Manager and it is free. The other is a small notebook to keep near your computer and is called Internet Notes

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