Great Local Start-up News – Soapbox Media

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Great Logo Development

Steve just ran across this site and I wanted to share it with everyone - http://logotournament.com/ - it's a logo design site that's perfect for start-ups.

This site allows you to submit an amount (example $300), a time limit (example 7 days), and a few characteristics from their guidelines (feminine, simple, colorful, sporty, modern, serious) to freelance designers who compete with multiple designs - using your comments on their drafts! It speeds up the creative process for logo design and is a great way to get an inexpensive first-round logo professionally developed.

For a great example, click on My Scorecard (one of the projects). This is Steve's friend's logotournament - pretty cool.

If you have other helpful sites for the group... let us know!

Closing the Innovation Gap

A number of InOneWeekenders along with a sizable group of regional entrepreneurs gathered at Via Vite Saturday for lunch to discuss Judy Estrin's book, Closing The Innovation Gap. Great discussion. I'm looking forward to digging into the book. Rather than rehash a number of ideas again, you can read my synopsis of Estrin's thoughts here.

I did want to bring up a couple of important ideas that Estrin surfaced during the course of our discussion. Innovation comes from teams much more than from individuals. To that end, someone asked how important diversity is to innovation. The generally accepted answer is "very," and Estrin agreed. She put a spin on the response, though, and added, "not for the reasons you would think."

Diversity is important, but that diversity is particular. In particular, cognitive diversity is important to innovation. Bringing together broad perspectives and experiences adds much more value to the innovative process. Sure, that probably means gender, racial, and ethnic diversity, but not simply because of the color of our skin. It is our collective experience that adds value.

I immediately thought back to our July weekend and could see how all of our participation in InOneWeekend brought together people that would otherwise never have met. We shared and contributed our broad experiences to a collective effort that none of us could have accomplished alone.

- Andy

Have you heard about Wallstick?

What do your walls say about You? Philanthropist and entrepreneur, Meredith Holthaus, thinks they could say so much more. Wallstick, a large format true-color adhesive print, allows you to take personal and meaningful moments and easily display them on your wall. To take the idea to the next level, Meredith leveraged relationships created during InOneWeekend to generate a plan.

With the kickoff of InOneAfternoon, a number of entrepreneurs came together for two hours of brainstorming and planning. The outcome produced a number of Wallstick ideas to support Holthaus' efforts and the structure for a format that allows entrepreneurs to regularly support each others' efforts. InOneWeekend showed us that a group of 100 can quite deeply and thoroughly vet an idea and create a business plan in one weekend in a way that a solitary business owner might not be able to do in 3 or 4 years. Does the same hold true for smaller or more focused efforts? I think so. Meredith walked away with a number of new ideas.

What I think this means for the Cincinnati entrepreneur community is that our efforts will become more and more visible to each other and the larger community. The top down efforts like Cincinnati's Agenda 360 to unite and direct regional growth efforts are necessary. Approaching regional growth from the bottom up with efforts like InOneWeekend and InOneAfternoon round out a full set of offerings that will inject some vibrant energy into the local community and regional economy. The region has a lot of great people looking to make a difference, and efforts like InOneWeekend and InOneAfternoon provide a forum to bring many of these people together.

- Andy

Posted using ShareThis

[Reference] Terrific Article on Web-based Photo/Album Experiences

http://mashable.com/2008/08/12/tools-for-viewing-photos-online/

For anyone who is looking for a great blog to follow as 'web 2.0' entrepreneur - Mashable.com is your best resource for measuring up your competition and staying on top of the newest services.

The link above showcases online photo viewing websites - there may be some great concepts for us to integrate in Lifespoke.

-R

Tearing Down To Build Up

How do you get 100 driven, motivated, energized leaders, all with their own ideas, moving in the same direction? You send ‘em to boot camp and hand ‘em over to the drill sergeant.

That’s exactly what happened to us at InOneWeekend. Pretty much everyone has experienced creative brainstorming sessions that generate ideas where “no idea is a wrong idea.” Well, I’ll tell you that you can have wrong ideas and wrong approaches. And our drill sergeant made that clear within the first five minutes. No, scratch that. Within the first 60 seconds.

All we had to do was distribute some index cards among us. In 60 seconds. That’s it. And we got 10 points for doing so. There were four stacks of cards sitting on the table at the front of the room. Just get up out of our seats, pick up the cards, and start spreading them around. Make sure everyone got one. 60 seconds. 10 points. The clock started. We all – every last one of us – just sat there. For the first 10 seconds you could hear a pin drop outside of our facilitator yelling, “you can start now,” a couple of times. Our minds were not free. And all the “leaders” in the room were followers.

Here we were at an entrepreneurship event and we were waiting for someone to tell us what to do. Sheesh. The odds of a successful weekend plummeted. At least as we sat there individually in our seats.

Jeff Stamp facilitated the creative session and idea generation event. Jeff, an inventor and entrepreneur himself, taught entrepreneurship at the college level, a concept I always thought strange. I mean, how do you teach something that seems to need to be a part of a person’s character? This guy changed my mind by minute two.

Why did we just sit there? Well, Jeff had flashed a slide that said the person sitting in the third seat from the left in the third row needed to accomplish the task. Then another slide flashed that said to distribute the green cards, of which there were not enough to go around. We all waited for the third person from the left in the third row to figure out who he was. Fair enough – if you’re waiting for somebody else to change the world. The only task was to distribute the cards. The finish line to win the points was 60 seconds.

Distribute cards. 60 seconds. 10 points. Everything else should have been irrelevant. The third person from the left in the third row could have been any one of us depending on our frame of reference. And who cares what color the cards were.

Not only did Jeff break us down and create a bunch of followers out of a bunch of leaders, essentially putting us in our places, he then put the pieces back together and had us functioning in teams where the parts added up to much more than the whole. We were excited, bonded, with no more pride I might add, and generating an amazing number of great ideas.

Oh, there were those who tried to hold on to their egos, and, oh, were they shut down.

“But here is the problem with this approach…”

“NO PROBLEMS, JUST SOLUTIONS.”

“But I think…”

“NO TIME. MOVE ON.”

“But…but…”

We all moved on.

There would be no subversion of the team to anyone’s ego or agenda. A couple of hours later we had our concept in an online scrapbooking web site. We continued to break into different groups to brainstorm, rank, and share features, as our distributed groups collaborated using a Google Docs spreadsheet. We functioned as a team. And the team became “our” team as it strengthened through the weekend.

Amazing.

- Andy