The New York Technology Council held an incubator showcase for several NYC-based incubators last summer. Joly MacFie from WWWhatsup NYC posted a video of the event – you can watch the 90 minute event below. Here’s the presenter list:

• Bruce Niswander, Director, Technology Innovation & Entrepreneurship, NYU-Poly
• Daria Siegel, Director of the Alliance for Downtown New York’s Hive at 55
• Natalia Arguello, Director, NYDesigns
• Matthew Shampine, Co-Founder, WeWork Labs
• Charles Kemper, Managing Director, ER Accelerator

From what I can tell, Hive and 55 and WeWork Labs are more coworking/shared office space than a traditional incubator where a group trades services for equity. Since the list does include coworking, I must include the first coworking space in NYC, New Work City.

Find more stories about: incubator, New Work City, NYC, startups

Yakov Sadchikov, President & CEO of visual search engine Quintura, has put together the following list of the top 10 Russian web startups for 2011.

In September 2011, Russia became the largest Internet market in Europe with 51 million online users. Who are the top emerging internet companies that disrupt the Russian market. Find out below a list of top 10 Russian web startups of 2011.

1. Oktogo.ru

Having raised $5 million in venture capital from European early-stage investors, Oktogo.ru is #1 in Russian online travel. Russia’s ‘Booking.com‘ Oktogo.ru has not only collected the largest online hotel database in Russia but also baked it with user reviews from TripAdvisor.

Oktogo.ru CEO Marina Kolesnik is one of the most visionary female internet entrepreneurs from Russia.

2. ZeptoLab (Cut the Rope)

Russia’s answer to Rovio‘s Angry Birds, ZeptoLab‘s Cut the Rope reached 60 million game downloads in the first year from initial release without venture money.

Managed by Voinov brothers, Misha Lyalin and, from recently, Diana Moldavsky, Moscow-based ZeptoLab strives to leverage its Om Nom game character by releasing Cut the Rope sequel and branching out into comic books and plush toys.

3. Biglion

Heavily-funded by Tiger Global and Ru-Net, coupon service Biglion beats Groupon and other upstarts in the space in Russia. Biglion delivers the highest revenue growth in Russia’s internet history: from zero to $15 million monthly revenues in one and a half years. Biglion could be the next largest internet IPO candidate from Russia after Yandex in 2011 and Mail.ru Group in 2010.

4. Metabar

Metabar is the perfect example of how to turn a simple idea into a hundred million business. Founded by Yandex grad Michael Ushakov, Metabar offers browser toolbar creation service, just like Conduit. To grow fast, Metabar has raised $1 million from Runa Capital.

5. Nginx

It’s hard to beat Microsoft. Nginx did it. The lightweight, high-performance web server, reverse proxy and e-mail proxy software provider Nginx is #2 web server software on the Web, behind only Apache. Founded by Rambler refugee Igor Sysoev, Nginx raised $3 million from global venture capital investors to make it a commercial success.

6. Lamoda

Online shoe store Lamoda.ru is the first project launched in Russia by Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet with funding from Holtzbrinck Ventures, Tengelmann Group and Investment AB Kinnevik. Lamoda stands against competion from Sapato.ru and Ozon.ru who both closed massive VC rounds in 2011.

7. Surfingbird

Curation is a hot trend on the Web. So is web discovery. Backed by $2.5 million from the French and Russian investors, Surfingbird.ru delivers a web recommendation and discovery service to end-users. Is it better than StumbleUpon? 2012 will tell us.

8. GridGain

St. Petersburg, Russia- and Foster City, California-based cloud computing software vendor GridGain employs the winning formula for Russian startups: a software development in Russia and sales & marketing in the U.S.

GridGain closed $2.5 million Series A in November 2011 led by RTP Ventures, the U.S. arm of Yandex and Ozon.ru investor Ru-Net Holdings of Leoind Boguslavsky.

9. BabyBoom

Kids’ goods online retailer BabyBoom.ru finds itself in a very crowded market space in Russia unless a baby boom is really coming to the country. Index Ventures‘ seed fund seems to believe in it by backing BabyBoom. We will see next year.

10. KupiVIP

Online commerce is booming in Russia. Top 10 Russian web startup of 2009, online shopping club KupiVIP.ru made headlines in April 2011 when it closed $55 million round from Bessemer, Balderton and Russia Partners, the largest internet startup funding in Russia. In 3 years from launch, KupiVIP managed to become bigger than Ozon.ru, a 10-year old ‘Amazon’ of Russia. Time to market is a key!

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Last weekend our hosting company moved the physical location of their servers — from San Antonio to Chicago. There were a number of very serious issues that appeared post-migration caused by the hosting company. I will address the issues and the responsiveness from the hosting company in another post once all of the post-mortem details have been provided to me. But what the downtime and issues made me quickly realize is I need to have a current, well-documented disaster plan for both the blogs and for my startup.

With a WordPress blog, there is the website (css, html, images, video, etc.) and then there’s the database. I have backups of both. Luckily there was no downtime passed the migration period for the blogs. As long as we keep current backups of both content and database, it would be relatively easy to create a new server installation, either at the same host or a different host and copy everything to the new location. Then it should be as simple as switching the DNS and waiting for the internet pipes to switch the tracks to the new location.

Obviously every startup and every company will have a different disaster plan. We backup our database several times a day so we can always revert back to a backup should the need arise. And we test the backups on a regular basis using a mirrored database. When my startup was down due to the hosting issues, I knew I needed to quickly be able to communicate to both current customers who would want to login to the system and to potential customers looking to place an order. I updated the affected web pages with a message explaining the situation and offering a way for customers to contact us, both by phone and by email. I also prepared an email blast but since the server was up and down, I decided not to send the email. I did monitor the social networks and responded to any queries or questions from customers.

Now that the site is back, I have created a duplicate of our public website as a “disaster version”. This will allow for quick deployment in the event that another round of downtime appears in the future. With a click I can move the disaster version into production and be assured that all of the right updates have been made. Once the issue is resolved, I can revert back to the pre-disaster website and continue business as usual. It’s important to remember that both the regular and disaster versions must be kept in sync.

I will also be looking into additional options around creating a complete mirror of both the website and database just in case further downtime arises. Once this “live” mirror is setup, should we experience any significant downtime, I can first activate the above disaster version and then just switch the DNS to the live mirror and there should very little impact.

I’d love feedback here about your disaster plans for your startups along with general tips and tricks. Leave a comment and I will add the feedback to the post.

Shevonne at Chicwriter has a good overview of questions you should ask as you create a disaster recovery plan.

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I’ve covered the worldwide Startup Weekend events over the past couple of years. The concept behind Startup Weekend is to bring the community together in a different city each weekend to create a startup (or multiple startups) during the weekend.

The event is coming back to Austin during the weekend of March 30th, just after SXSW. The weekend of events will be held at Hub Coworking which is a few minutes south of the city center. Pricing runs from $75-$99 and if it is like the last event, meals will be provided. You can register here and there is an early bird registration that runs through February 17.

For those of you that are new to the Startup Weekend concept, here’s the overview, “Startup Weekends are 54-hour events designed to provide superior experiential education for technical and non-technical entrepreneurs.  Beginning with Friday night pitches and continuing through brainstorming, business plan development, and basic prototype creation, Startup Weekends culminate in Sunday night demos and presentations.

Participants create working startups during the event and are able to collaborate with like-minded individuals outside of their daily networks. All teams hear talks by industry leaders and receive valuable feedback from local entrepreneurials. The weekend is centered around action, innovation, and education.  Whether you are looking for feedback on a idea, a co-founder, specific skill sets, or a team to help you execute, Startup Weekends are the perfect environment in which to test your idea and take the first steps towards launching your own startup.”

Find more stories about: Austin, Startup Weekend, startups, Texas

Startup.ch has just released their Top 100 Swiss startups list. The list is only available in German on the website, but you can still easily navigate to the individual startups websites which are all available in English. They have also broken the list down by category, here’s a link to the Internet/Technology startups. Startup.ch notes that over 200,000 companies have been started in Switzerland since 2006.

The top 10 are:

1. Optotune
2. Dacuda
3. Doodle (our Doodle coverage)
4. Lemoptix
5. Poken (our Poken coverage)
6. Insphero
7. Smallrivers (known better as paper.li)
8. HouseTrip
9. Malcisbo
10. Aimago

You can also download a magazine about Swiss startup life and an overview of each startup in the Top 100 in English.

Find more stories about: startups, Switzerland

Swiss-based, social collaboration service Amazee has announced that they will be closing their platform effective December 23, 2011. We covered Amazee back in early 2010 and the social service was described as, ” the platform for collective action, where people initiate movements, find followers, collaborate and boost the attention for their cause.”

Their blog explains why the service is shutting down, “In the meantime, however, Facebook, Google and other large innovators have become all you can imagine, including enablers for social change. On our side, we have converted the business model. Amazee Labs has grown into a successful web development agency and requires our full attention. The work on amazee.com has therefore suffered big time and has become mostly restricted to maintenance work. If Web products don’t move ahead, they go backwards.”

The good news is that the team pivoted over time and their web consultancy Amazee Labs is going strong and will remain open.

Amazee will delete all data on December 23, 2011 so I assume that if you want your data, you should save it before that date.

Find more stories about: Amazee, startups, Switzerland

Today at the Capital Factory Demo Day, ethernet creator Bob Metcalfe provided the morning keynote. If you get a chance to hear him speak, you should go – he was a great speaker.

Bob shared 5 tips for startup success…

Tip #1 – Health

You don’t need to kill yourself to run a startup. Instead you have to take care of yourself and make sure your health is in order. You should sleep 8 hours every night.

Tip #2 – Writing

Bob suggests that you write as much as possible – what’s great is that today this is very easy to do with the available tools.

Tip #3 – Speaking

Bob talked about how great Steve Jobs is as a speaker. He suggests (which I agree with) that you speak as much as you can about your product or service.

Tip #4 – Selling

You should spend time selling – he notes people consider salespeople lower than pond scum but they are critical to a company. Even if you are a developer/engineer, you should still learn how to and sell. At a minimum you need to sell your team on why they should follow your direction.

Tip #5 – Planning

Bob explained how important it is that you have a plan. His company (3com) used the acronym MOST – mission, objectives, strategies, tactics. He noted that each year at 3com they would adjust MOST as needed.

I like Bob’s suggestions and I can confirm that health is the most important thing when it comes to the early days of a company.

Find more stories about: Austin, Conferences, startups

The first Austin Startup Week is here! Beginning tomorrow and continuing for the balance of the week, a number of startup-related events will take place around the city. I will be at most of the events representing CloudContacts and will have my camcorder so hit me up for an interview for your startup.

You can find a full list of the Austin Startup Week events on the calendar and below are some of the events to check out:

• ATX Startup Crawl – Wednesday – check out the offices of a bunch of downtown Austin startups
• Capital Factory Demo Day – Wednesday – event is sold out but you can watch a livestream, several keynotes plus launch demos from the Capital Factory incubator and a number of Austin startup demos in the afternoon
• OpenCoffee – Thursday – casual gathering of folks discussing tech topics
• StartupBazaar – Thursday – at City Hall – startups will demo their services (I am trying to get CloudContacts in to demo) and free startup coaching offered
• Austin Tech Happy Hour – Thursday evening – I attended this once before (the one day that it flurried!) and it was a great event – very casual, bar atmosphere, no demos just conversation
• I Can Haz Mobile and Gaming – Friday – half-day mini-conference with speakers on the topics of gaming and mobile
• API Hackday ATX – Saturday – all day hackathon with some groovy prizes

Find more stories about: Austin, Conferences, startup, startups, Texas

Aardvark founders Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz have just announced that the Aardvark service will be closing as of the end of this month. Apparently the shutdown is part of the larger Google Labs shutdown that was announced earlier this summer. Aardvark was acquired by Google in early 2010 for $50 million.

Max and Damon note, “We’ve been excited to share these lessons within Google over the past year, especially as part of the effort behind Google+.  It has been gratifying to see how well this project is doing — even in these early stages, Google+ has already become a great place to share knowledge online, eclipsing the original vark.com! — and there is much more to come very soon.  In this and other projects at Google, the Aardvark team remains committed to developing powerful tools for connecting people and improving access to information.”

Since I don’t use Gmail or Gtalk regularly, I don’t see many Aardvark requests. Although every once in a while, I get a popup from Aardvark inside of Google+ asking me if I want to answer a question.

You have until September 30th to copy your data or ask Aardvark for an export. After this data the data will be deleted forever.

Find more stories about: Google, startups

WinExtra editor Steven Hodson posted the photo seen below last night on Google+. The photo really got me thinking – first, the newly-created space is clearly an awesome place to hide valuables from evil intruders. But more importantly, how many times have we all gone up and down a staircase and never thought about innovating the steps.

Innovation and improvement…it can happen at every single point within your startup. Now go modify your steps. One step at a time.

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Here are some good startup and entrepreneurial readings from across the web:

• The Price of (Dev) Happiness: Part One – Fogcreek
• 10 Tips For Open Source Citizens – Intridea
• Developing Android apps: it’s really not so bad! – Ben’s Macroblog
• Mark Cuban’s favorite books – VIPReads
• Worshiping False Business Gods, Finding the Right Metrics – Louis Gray
• Zero to hero – 10 bulletproof steps to 1000 visits a day. – WebDistortion
• When Startups Fail, Investors Recoup by Selling Patents – Wired
• Here’s What Happens When You Try to Edit Photos of Money in Photoshop – PetaPixel

Don’t forget to send in your suggestions for the next startup readings update!

Find more stories about: Entrepreneur, startups

In the wee hours of yesterday morning, I found a link to an absolutely horrible story on Hacker News about a person named EJ and her accounts of the Airbnb rental she provided last month. I noted on Twitter that while the idea for Airbnb seems interesting, I’d never rent my apt (or part thereof) to someone I don’t know. Airbnb has blown up over the past year receiving tons of press and $100 million in VC. Other startups are now referring to their companies as the, “Airbnb of xxxx”. I think part of Airbnb’s appeal pulls on our greed card and the ability to generate some quick cash.

You can read EJ’s original story, her update and Techcrunch’s combined snippet copy with Mike’s commentary. The short version is that EJ rented her apartment to a person while she was out of town and the apartment was completely trashed, very valuable items were stolen and the apartment ransacked. Just an absolutely horrible story as the criminal actually went through all of her stuff. EJ’s update seems to suggest serious differences between what she and Airbnb staff have publicly reported.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky posted on Techcrunch an overview of what Airbnb is doing with regards to safety.

First, let me play the other side…where is EJ’s renter’s insurance? I am curious, if you become a “seller” on Airbnb, do you let your renter’s insurance company know? Does that make your apartment a B&B? I wonder how many sellers on Airbnb do this research before renting. Video learning site Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis notes that EJ should have, “understood the risks”. He goes on to say that hotel rooms are trashed all the time and that, “this is such a BS issue”. I am not sure that comparing trashing a hotel room with stealing and ransacking an apartment is even remotely the same.

So why do I think this rental mess isn’t about the stuff that so many are making it out to be about? To me the biggest fear I have of ever using Airbnb is physical crime. What if EJ came home when the criminal was in her apartment? Many of the rental experiences I’ve heard about on Airbnb are where the owner rents out a part of his or her home which could just open the doors to physical crime. I hate to even think about it – I’d like to hear what Airbnb is doing to make sure this type of crime never happens for their customers. I should note that Airbnb claims over 2 million rental nights to-date with no issues of this nature.

Airbnb notes that they have a social connections service that shows mutual friends on Facebook. I think their rental service is going to have to allow for the creation of trusted circles.

It will be interesting to follow what happens with this story and if god forbid anything worse happens in the future. I hope EJ is able to get the help, both financially and emotionally, to help her move past this horrible incident.

Update: I like Patricio Robles’ post on eConsultancy. He talks about how criminals will flock to Airbnb and how the service may change as regular users leave. He also notes that it is apparently against the law in San Francisco (where EJ is located) to rent out a home for a short period of time.

Find more stories about: Airbnb, startups

Earlier this morning I learned that startup community site Sprouter is closing in early August. While I sat watching my laundry spin at the laundromat, I started to think about my thoughts on why Sprouter didn’t make it.  During the spin cycle, Martin Bryant and Audrey Watters have also posted about the closure. Martin wonders if Quora did them in — I disagree with Martin.

I remember meeting founder Sarah Prevette in NYC shortly after Sprouter launched. I could tell she had one mission: to help startups succeed. I remember the conversation clearly because a lot of what she talked about was similar to what I was trying to do with CN in the early days. Sarah notes that the service is shutting down due to, “capital constraints.” While she never shared how much the company raised, I believe they raised a small angel round when the service first launched. Sprouter found its roots in Sarah’s previous startup: Redwire.

Sprouter went through several pivots in its lifetime – most recently as a Q&A and “expert chat” service.

From looking at the photos and hearing the post-event reviews, I think Sprouter’s best chance for success was to offer paid startup parties and workshops around the country (U.S. and Canada). Many of their events had lines around the block waiting to get in and that formula could have been duplicated. I think there’s a real gap for event-based learning in the startup community.

I am sure we will hear from Sarah soon as she has a strong personal brand presence in Canada and in the U.S.

Find more stories about: Sprouter, startups

Here are some good startup and entrepreneurial readings for this long holiday weekend from across the web:

• Among Six Types Of Failure, Only A Few Help You Innovate – Fastcodesign
• Stop wasting your time, learn to outsource – TaskArmy
• Why yo momma won’t use Google+ (and why that thrills me to no end) – Robert Scoble (Allen: if you read this post, replace all references to Google+ with Friendfeed and change your clock to 2007)
• Starting your Startup – Joe Stump
• Beware – “Advisors” Slide – Hard Tech Startup

Don’t forget to send in your suggestions for the next weekend startup and entrepreneur collection!

Find more stories about: Entrepreneur, startups

Here are some good startup and entrepreneurial readings for this long holiday weekend from across the web:

• “Our Marketing Is Up Fog Creek” And What We Did About It – Fog Creek Software
• 10 Good Reasons to Hire a Grown-Up – Susan Kim
• Incubators, incubators, every where – Startup North (interesting post about the massive number of incubators coming online- interestingly when I proposed the concept of VC-backed coworking 3 years ago, it was shot down yet today it is welcomed – might be interesting to look into what dynamics have changed in the three years to welcome the incubator model today.)
• Success in startups takes time. It’s a long, long road. – Jason Freedman
• Sitting is Killing You – Medical Billing
• Lean Startup Lessons Learned – Carlos
• Some places to list your startup post-launch – DIY Startup News

Don’t forget to send in your suggestions for the next weekend startup and entrepreneur collection!

Find more stories about: Entrepreneur, startups