They say that second place is the same as last place. So is last place.

We feature Microsoft Accounting in our book, The Startup Bible as a genuinely excellent and relatively inexpensive accounting software for business, along with the much more scaled-down Microsoft Money (suitable for low-revenue, one-person businesses). Alas, neither Money (which Microsoft announced it [...]

Hope they didn’t pay for that logo and tagline!

Nearly the entire Shoestring Publications staff is busy whipping the second edition of The Startup Bible into shape for a New Year’s unveiling, so we’re also busy revisiting and re-reviewing all of the resources we recommended in the first edition. Among the very top recommendations we gave [...]

Steve has spent a lifetime as an entrepreneur, so check out his interview!

No, it’s not a dating site for lonely startup companies who would otherwise be hopelessly trolling around CraigsList. SingleStartups.com profiles young, energetic entrepreneurs who just so happen to be single, and publishes articles and interviews on what motivates them, what lifestyle they’ve chosen, [...]

Our book,

Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing so futile.
Bertrand Russell

Tags: quotes

Amazon, WalMart, and Target are in a book price war, further commodifying and cheapening the value of published books. WalMart started the war by offering ten upcoming bestsellers — including highly-anticipated tomes by Sarah Palin and Michael Crichton — at the incredibly low price of $10 each for pre-orders. Amazon responded by dropping the price [...]

Do they exist? And should you care?
For many of us marketers, entrepreneurs, and harried small businesspeople, we often directly or tangentially mosey across this or that demographic, since correctly targetting a specific audience with our products or services is key to our promotional success. Some of these demographics we know — or think we know [...]

MySpace, which has been steadily losing ground to Facebook over the last year like a cartoon character that’s run off a cliff, has just announced today that it’s strategy against its fierce and formidable competitor is . . . to give up. As reported in today’s Financial Times, CEO Owen Van Natta has decided that [...]

From Dana Goodyear’s memorable profile of director James Cameron in this week’s New Yorker, comes today’s chew-on-this toy straight from the master’s mouth:
“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.”

Tags: success

In the “book titles that just don’t work” department:

In either a fit of cruel honesty or, more likely, a fit of “not looking,” as my old mentor, Rick Memsic, would say, the author, by titling his book, “A Crash Course: Ride The Unicycle,” has vividly enumerated all the reasons I have for not riding a [...]

Many moons ago, when this blog was still new and fresh, I wrote a post about the world’s most demented exercise machine, a startlingly stupid mobile treadmill that allowed you to treadmill your way around the neighborhood. Of course, the Einstein’s who introduced the mobile treadmill did not sufficiently differentiate their thousand dollar contraption from, [...]

Dynamic Logic, a subsidiary company of market researcher, Millward Brown, just released a new study showing that the effectiveness of online advertisements have more to do with the creative than hyper-vigilance in placement or other metric-centric tools. Dynamic Logic finds that, once you have rationalized the placement and timing of online ads, it’s creative that [...]

Generating conversions from SEM starts out like random gambling, but it’s a slot machine that you can figure out.

Our book, The Startup Bible, covers all the introductory issues of search engine marketing, including a good introduction to using day-parting, which allows you to specify what times of day you would like your ad to appear [...]

The Heene’s have aptly lived up to their name as one of the heinous parents in the TV amusement park 15-minute celebrity ride. But as prosecutors begin to mull over possible criminal charges, what can the Heenes expect by looking at others who have also taken a whirligig spin on the same 15-minute celebrity ride? [...]

GPS. Think outside the driving directions box.

Cars.
That’s right, integrating smartphone and other apps with people’s vehicles, especially positioning and navigating.
Recently, Nokia demonstrated at the Internationale Automobil Ausstellung (which the non-German speaking world calls “The Frankfurt Auto Show”) unveiled a smartphone that totally integrates with the vehicle, so that all the apps and their functionality are [...]

James Dyson unveils his newest invention, a fan without blades:

Tags: product development

It is a well-established fact among statisticians, pollers, and market researchers that somewhere around 5% of all survey responders are, in fact, stupid. I kid you not. I learned that statistic in my first marketing research class, my second marketing research class, four more statistics classes, and a consumer behavior class. That’s seven different professors [...]

Need a great product idea? Dress up the old product and call it a day.

For those of us thinking about new product ideas, Haagen Dazs provides yet another case study in astonishingly brilliant and equally astonishingly simplistic product development and marketing genius: Haagen Dazs Five. Haagen Dazs, like other premium product manufacturers, has found life [...]

The Series
Introduction
1.) Internal Rate of Return
1a.) Modified Internal Rate of Return
2.) Net present value
3.) Payback
4.) Average
5.) Standard deviation
Bonus!) Excel Solver

Many moons ago, I started a series of blog posts on the five spreadsheet formulas every entrepreneur should know and, well, the follow-up never really followed up. Over the next ten days, however, we’re going to [...]

So why’s the Amazon logo smiling? ‘Cause they just outclassed all their competition yet again.

For all of us in the Internet marketing space, keeping up with Amazon is a mighty tough race. They set the standard in delivery, logistics, and customer satisfaction, which is where they devote all their brand-building efforts, rather than in marketing.
Today, [...]