Suggestions welcome: what should the January Edition include?

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Original post from 2010:

With so many Y Combinator style startup / seed / idea incubator & accelerator programs out there, you can lose track of upcoming deadlines. So here is a list of upcoming application deadlines for year 2010 (now outdated) for you (click on date for more information):

LaunchBox (Washington, DC, USA): May 31.

Techstars Seattle (Seattle, WA, USA): June 1

Extreme University (Toronto, Canada): June 12

Startup Bootcamp (Copenhagen, Denmark): June 30

Currently not open, coming up later this year:

Seedcamp (London, UK) – with Mini Seedcamp’s across Europe open until July

The Difference Engine (NE England, UK)

Bootup Labs (Vancouver)

Bizdom U (Detroit, USA)

Seed Accelerator (Australia & Singapore)

Past deadlines:

NYC Seedstart (New York City, USA): February 28

The Openfund (Athens, Greece): February 28

i/o ventures (San Francisco, CA, USA): March 1

Y Combinator (Mountain View, CA, USA): March 3

Morpheus (India): March 10

Startl (Philadelphia, PA, USA): March 15

Tech Wildcatters (Dallas, TX, USA): March 19

Techstars Boulder (Boulder, CO, USA): March 22

DreamIt Ventures (Philadelphia, PA, USA): March 22

Betaspring (Providence, RI, USA): March 22

Tetuan Valley (Madrid & Barcelona, Spain): March 23

SproutBox (Bloomington, IN, USA), March 28

iVentures10 (Champaign, IL, USA): March 31

Capital Factory (Austin, TX, USA): April 2

True Entrepreneur Corps (San Francisco, CA, USA): April 2

Excelerate Labs (Chicago, IL, USA): April 2

NextStart (Greenville, SC, USA): April 5

AlphaLab (Pittsburgh, PA, USA): April 8

Shotput Ventures (Atlanta, GA, USA): April 10

Lightspeed Summer Fellowship (Menlo Park, CA, USA): April 15

Please add any other in comments and I’ll update the list.

UPDATE: Updated list for 2011/2012 available at http://startupin.me/incubators

Automatically collected structured recommendations and top lists from friends. How often have you wished to know, what your friends read, listen to, watch? Until we have to manually rate or like stuff, it will not work. More data must be collected and processed automatically, transparently.

Personalized content selection. How old-fashioned is it to present all readers of a newspaper with the same news and articles?  Time to grow up and present everyone with their own newspaper, TV channel and mobile portal. Static stuff is dying. Google personalized search results is a step in right direction.

Better social grouping. Saying “friends” in paragraphs above might bring disastrous results. Let’s be frank, we all have nutcases and axe murderers hiding in our social network friend lists. Hoping they all read just intellectual stuff and watch arty movies might not work. Instead you might end up with Dan Brown and Steven Seagal. So we need API-accessible lists and grouping based more on similarities of people, akin Twitter lists. Manual lists might not work, so some automation and algorithm based stuff might be needed.

Cutting out the old middlemen. There are still many intermediaries in all sectors of life, that can be cut off. Based on previous, newspapers and schedule-based TV channels are prime examples: in some parts they are replaced with personalized, search and recommendations based solutions. For other content, many other current portals, destination sites can be replaced with people finding bits and pieces of content or functional small services directly. Two clicks are always better than 3 or 4. This will also erode many current business models, so as a start-up, see where you can bring the current price down or make stuff just simpler to use.

TV add-ons and Internet-enabling. TV is great as a screen and entertainment device, but it needs an Internet connection and real-time action possibilities. These might be either built into the TV set, into set-top boxes, USB add-ons, remote devices, mobile or tablets.

Wearables and mobile phone add-ons. As mobile processor power grows, we should put it to better use via add-ons. Might be health and movement related or just for fun. People love fun!

Health & medical 2.0 and life guidance. Not just software, but also hardware. Just have a gut feeling, there is something boiling. As a biomedical engineering & electronics drop-out, I am fascinated what next years will bring. Even if it takes years for good human-computer interfaces and electronic eye display lenses to go mass market. Then you’ll get your augmented reality.

Multi-channel solutions. Part browser, part mobile, part tablet, part TV – stuff hanging somewhere between them. Some new services will be successful if you use at least 2 of those channels in parallel or in succession.

Anything location-based. We have no idea today where Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp etc will develop. There is a lot of room for others. Be creative.

Social gaming / education. It will be hard to draw a line where entertainment ends and learning begins. It will be a mash of fun, education, socializing, networking, doing business. Just don’t think that business and learning must be serious or that fun and games is a waste of time.

Modern enterprise IT. Let’s be frank, consumer technology is light-years ahead of solutions used in corporate environments. We need more social, more user-generated, more real-time in enterprise.

Saving money. Kind of no-brainer and probably a childish suggestion, but always a good starting point to brainstorm startup ideas. Study what private people and companies spend their money on, list it, analyze it, see if there is something where technology can lower the costs. Also: saving time – analyze, for what we use our personal and employee time.

Please add your ideas, problems, wishes and thoughts in comments. I might be also editing this post as I remember more stuff.

Together between ArcticStartup, Connect Estonia and OpenCoffee Tallinn we are organising a kick-ass tech startup event: ArcticEvening on January 28th in Tallinn.

The evening will include pitches from 2 Estonian and 2 Finnish startups, a panel between Sten Tamkivi from Skype, Allan Martinson from MTVP and a special Finnish guest, followed by drinks and networking.

From the interest people both from Finland and Estonia have shown, it promises to be a great event. Feel free to join us either a participant or submit your startup pitch to be among the 4 lucky starups to promote yourself there. You’ll meet an international bunch of enterpreneurs, tech people, VC’s and others. And it’s all free!

The number of seats is limited to 100, and in half a day half of these are already “sold out” so to join us, register on the event page already now – we might be full in a few days!

See you in Tallinn!

1. Downturn makes you think. Management of a startup often feels like being a “rat on a wheel.” Now is a good time to sit back, relax, look into the ceiling and think some deep thoughts. What could be changed? Where are the inefficiencies? What are we doing wrong? What could be done better? Taking some dedicated time to (re)think on these issues you can come up with new ideas and solutions that you can then use to take your startup to the next level. Many people need this push from the external environment to take the time for this kind of thinking.

2. Good M&A opportunities. Most of startups still have cash or are in a good operational situation. Why not use these times to see which other startups to buy or merge. Even if they are also just starting, have just a few employees or only tens of thousands of visitors, they could be a good addition to your team, product or service. And don’t think badly of mergers even if you are a smaller party. Having a small piece of a great company can be great fun. At least much better than going out of business or not reaching your dreams.

3. Availability of great people. Hiring will not stop, even when there are layoffs. Letting unproductive people go is something that happens at all companies and that should be often done even in good times, now it is just much more visible. At the same time there are many great people available on the market, so go out and have them join your team. Today they might be even much more reasonable about their terms, willing to take more in shares than in cash or looking more at the long term perspective.

4. Focus on sales. As a CEO, founder or just an employee, today is the day to think how to get 50% more out of your sales actions. Reach out more to potential customers. Use your network, even friends and relatives to get new potential customers. If your main revenue source is advertising, consider having more special one-off solutions that you can propose to your customers in addition to standard banner and text ad spaces. Talk to customers 50% more than yesterday, ask them more about their needs and desires and urge all of your people to do the same.

5. Creative marketing. Now is a good time to save money and at the same time achieve more. A dream come true for any marketer. Use less standard solutions. Experiment. Try out new things, both online as well as offline. Partner with service providers that are also startups, hungry for business and willing to go that extra mile to do something innovative for you. Measure. Kill things that do not work.

6. Focus on long-term product development. This comes back to the “rat in a wheel” and short-term plans and execution. While in some areas like sales and marketing there is now more urgency to achieve more in less time, in product and service development you could dedicate more time now into things that have to be “ready” or reach maturity only after 1-3 years. Of course this means you have strong enough warchest or are already profitable. If yes, focusing on bigger long-term projects can mean much bigger rewards when the economy gets better after a few years.

7. Strong get stronger. Less clutter on the market makes good companies like yours stand out more. Do the right things. Stay alive and show your usefulness to your customers. Darwin knew his business. There is a reason in nature why the weak and stupid die.

8. The money is out there. The funding is still there. Angels still have their money, ask for it before they spend it all on yachts and space travel. VC funds still have their money. Stupid ideas get less funding. More is left for you, your good ideas and perfect execution.

9. Companies built to last. Forget exits for a while, this should not be your goal (although you can let the investors think it is). Take a view of where you want to be in 3-5 years. Try to be cash-flow positive, grow from your revenues, from the money you get from customers, not investors. Build a strong company, where you would want to stay for years to come and not even want to sell.

10. New startup opportunities. If you still have a dayjob at an established company, this might be the best time to leave that and follow your dreams. You might be ready to market just when customers are ready to buy what you have to offer. If you already are at a startup, try to come up with some innovations or new ideas that could be put into action there.

Probably you can add many reasons and potential actions yourself. Feel free to add them to comments.

We have good Baltic examples of great companies coming out from the last downturn as well. One of the best examples is the biggest Baltic social networking company One.lt (Forticom), which was basically bankrupt back in the beginning of the century. Now it is valued at hundreds of millions of euros thanks to perseverance of its founders and management. A job well done in tough times.

If you are good, you should be positive and full of optimism. I am. Times have never been better.

The best way to get event notifications is to join our Facebook group here – we have 207 members now.

The next events are scheduled on November 6th, December 4th and January 8th. I would bet that a 9 AM event on January 1st would not be too popular, unless some drinks are involved.

Opencoffee Club Tallinn events are usually attended by 20-50 persons from all areas of startups and technology, a bunch of great people.

Our official event announcements are posted on our Facebook Group (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6854479626) which as of today has over 130 members. Feel free to join to have the event invitations sent to you each month.

Everyone active on the technology scene is welcome, like always, just show up any time between 9-11 AM, grab a cup of coffee, introduce yourself to others and just let it flow from there. The first event in Tallinn was a blast, with around 40 people from various fields (startups, VC’s, academia, government etc) showing up.

Many people have asked us, why should anyone use a local photo site as opposed to something like Flickr. Many reasons. Localisation does not mean just translation. You also have things like integration with other local services, for example ordering photo prints. Nagi works with 4 local companies in this sphere, while Flickr at best just gives you an error message about being in unspported country. Being in Europe, local is always faster, even with Google’s, Yahoo’s and other shared data centres. But it is also a local feeling, local places, local people being part of the service. Photo services or communities in general in many European countries have shown they need to be local.

During the first 2 months around 3000 users have registered, we have over 20 thousand unique visitors and about 1 million pageviews per week. This weekend we also exceeded a milestone of having 100 thousand photos uploaded. Again, to compare with Flickr or other international services – there are only a few hundred Estonians on each of them, and that is not a community, while our’s already is. Same for things like tagged photos, you can find a lot about local places, nature and people on Nagi, but not in other countries.

We did Nagi as a team of 4 persons: 2 software developers and 1 user interface developer in addition to me. All of us have previously worked on developing what today is known CV-Online / CVO Group, the largest online recruitment company in Central and Eastern Europe. Knowing and trusting each other helps in this phase.

We are bootstrapping for now, using our own finances (mostly for servers, storage, data centre services etc). The biggest investment of course is doing all the work for free. Hopefully we can start generating some advertising revenues soon, to delay external financing as far as possible or not doing it at all for at least our plans in Estonia. Nagi generates some tiny revenues already now from photo prints and pro packages with more disk space, but that is insignificant and probably will be so in a small country also in the future. Still we have big bets put on online advertising market, living and growing off from that. As for talking to angels and VC’s, we do that if someone shares our vision and is interested, as there could be advantages in raising some financing now, but we are not actively going out doing that for now.

Since we expanded CV-Online across the region, everyone is asking if we will do that with Nagi as well. And I am really not sure. Nagi can be very successful and profitable even if it stays only in Estonia, and we want to focus on that only for at least 6 months. After that, nobody knows.