FusionCharts is today a common name among web developers with over 16,000 organizations in 110 countries using it. It is used by names as big as LinkedIn, weather.com, Google, Cisco, GE and World bank. Howmuchever it sounds like a carefully crafted 12-point business plan by a left-brained Harvard-passout, it is so much the opposite. It [...]

TweetPsych creates a profile of any public twitter account.

Ever wonder how your social networking “psychological profile” compares to that of other public twitter accounts? Now there is a site that does precisely at the low, low cost of free.
TweetPsych lists creates a psychological profile of any public Twitter account and compares it to the thousands [...]

Any food will do. Like spam, for instance.

Over the past three months, we here at Shoestring Venture have been damn-the-burritos-full-speed-ahead in social networking and marketing. Business, as you all know, is a school of hard knocks and, I can tell you feelingly, social marketing is a class where the hard knocks rain down like a [...]

It’s like one of them birds in the Hitchcock movie . . .

For all you entrepreneurs, small business owners, and marketers using social networking to get your message out, you may have noticed that Twitter — that rich-person charity for the rest of us — really seems to be conked out much of the time. [...]

Mobile coupons. Read on . . .
Retailer JCPenney has introduced a mobile coupon program for its Houston customers via a partnership with mobile technology firm Cellfire.
The program enables customers to use mobile coupons that are scanned at the point of sale in JCPenney stores. To do so, consumers must first download a special Cellfire [...]

“You see, officer, I had to check my Twitter, like, duh, because my best friend just broke up with her boyfriend yesterday but then my other friend just sends me a Twitter about his rents totally going off on him and he’s majorly bummed and just then . . .”

CrowdScience just completed a study of [...]

I’m thinking we shoulda’ called it The Micro-Startup Bible, since that’s the new VC fashion.

Venture capitalists learn a new fashion — micro-startups. Kind of like a shoestring venture, no?
Two dozen companies displayed their wares on Wednesday in brief talks that are the graduation ceremony at Y Combinator, which invests up to $20,000 in Silicon Valley [...]

Amazon
Can the Amazon Kindle greed machine take on Apple with it’s tablet-iTunes machine-color ebook reader as well as Barnes & Noble and Sony? Here’s the rare situation — like Blu-Ray vs. HD — where the content providers will decide.
Democrats
About to lose the health care reform game because of the dizzingly bad idea of spending a [...]

Welcome to Twitter hell.

In a previous post, I promulgated two rules for your business and personal use of social media networks and marketing. My number one rule: “the mike is always on.” If you don’t want to regret saying it, don’t say it.
Just in case you weren’t convinced, along comes Tweleted, which went live in [...]

Heading up business news this week was the hacker attack on Twitter, who made off with some 310 sensitive corporate documents. But the biggest news in this attack for the rest of us is how darn easy it was. In a must-read article on TechCrunch, Nik Cubrilovic interviewed the hacker and published a general outline [...]

As the social media toolbox grows, the challenge of integrating various and sundry friend feeds and twitter feeds and blog this and updates that with your total Web presence is becoming a major tactical and strategic puzzle. In particular, wholesale adoption of Web 2.0 marketing and communications threatens the traditional entire hub-and-spoke strategy built on [...]

Just a couple days ago, UberCEO published a semi-formal study of the CEO’s of the Fortune 100 companies and found — no surprise — that they were way behind the social networking curve. Money quote:
Only two CEOs have Twitter accounts.

13 CEOs have LinkedIn profiles, and of those only three have more than 10 connections.

81% of [...]

Godzilla is afraid.

This blog eschews politics like a magotty bone jealously guarded by a killer pit bull. So we really aren’t going to wade into the murk of the clearly rigged election results in Iran (really, if you’re going to steal an election, 50.1% wins the election just as well as a clearly contrived 63%). [...]

When is an indie house not an indie house?
New Line has been surprising those who thought the rump operation — it has only about 50 employees, down from nearly 600 before Warner absorbed it — would be crushed by corporate politics and the sheer weight of Warner’s own, blockbuster-oriented moviemaking machinery. . . .
Mr. Emmerich [...]

The day is coming.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, solopreneur, or small business owner, you’ll eventually have to dive into the social media marketing pool with the rest of us. Right now, of course, that means — at a minimum — launching some kind of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn campaign.
But unless you’ve grown up on Twitter, you’re [...]

As social networking — particularly Twitter and similar short-form messaging services — becomes more and more important to disseminating product and service information across a wide audience, we’ve seen an explosive growth of “URL shorteners,” services that are intended to take those long http-colon-slash-slash-tonsofgobbledeygookydogpilesfromyourcontentmanagementsystem and make them short-form friendly. Since we’re adding an entire section [...]

I love this story which landed in my email box from Michael Josephson over at CHARACTER COUNTS! this morning. He’ll probably sue me from here to Thursday (he is, after all, a lawyer), but it’s worth sharing in its entirety. I have a much different take on it than Mr. Josephson — I see it [...]

Two recent articles in The New York Times deserve every entrepreneur’s close attention, the first dealing with small businesses caught up in the fireworks when their lenders go under and the second dealing with the impending bankruptcy of General Growth Properties, the second-largest owner of shopping malls in the country and the first major commercial [...]

You see, the trick is in telling the difference.
In discussing the delicate line that regulators must walk, he said: “The challenge faced by regulators is to strike the right balance: to strive for the highest standards of consumer protection without eliminating the beneficial effects of responsible innovation on consumer choice and access to credit.”. . [...]

What happens when your bank fails? Your overextended small biz loan becomes toxic.
Clashes like this are increasingly taking place across the country, as banks struggle through their worst crisis in a generation. And Mr. Williamson is part of a niche industry that buys at bargain-basement prices the hard-to-collect commercial loans that the Federal Deposit Insurance [...]