Filed under: Estates

If there were real estate staging awards (and really there should be, I might just need to create them) then today’s listing might be nominated in the “most obvious” category. This three-bedroom New York condo loft at 76 Crosby is the one of those white New York box condos and instead of using colorful furniture to warm the place up a bit the stagers used white couches, white flowers, white towels in the water closet. Also, I think the Barcelona lounge chair should be stricken from the stager’s playbook. The condo’s walls are blindingly white but the bathrooms are dark stone and tile caves of bathing retreat. The opaque glass wall in the living room also gives me pause, it makes the space seem rather narrow. The apartment is over 5, 262 square feet of space but the pictures don’t seem to show that to best effect. Coincidentally, when I was googling around for more information on this building I saw that Curbed covered this place yesterday pointing out that both Gawker head Nick Denton and cheery TV personality Kelly Ripa inhabit the same building. I also found an old sold listing at Corcoran with a very similar staging job. This one is listed at $9.4 million.

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Filed under: Yahoo! (YHOO), Small business

LinkedIn has become a great tool to help improve your business. For example, Brant Bukowsky, the founder of LakeRentals.com, used the on the internet service to locate a prospect for a management buyout. Or take MyBlogLog. The company found its CEO with LinkedIn and a year later, the company sold to Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO);

So, how can you use LinkedIn for your business?

Well, I recently had a opportunity to meet up with Allen Blue, the Vice President of Product Strategy of LinkedIn and the company’s co-founder.

In fact, he provided a framework on how to use LinkedIn. Let’s take a look:

Startup Phase: If you’re thinking of launching a business, then LinkedIn can be a huge help. Essentially, you have a pool of 19 million knowledgeable users to work with.

“You can test your idea,” said Blue, “and get valuable feedback. You can do this by searching the profiles on LinkedIn.”

In other words, you can get information on the competitive environment as well as strategies on the business model, go-to-market strategy and so on.

Running Your Business: No doubt, you need to build a solid foundation for your new business. To this end, you can poll the LinkedIn network by using the Q&A feature.

Based on my experience, you’re likely to get great responses to your questions. Some things you might ask include: What is the best payroll service? How do you put together an employee handbook? What about stock options?

What’s more, you can search your network to hiring key employees or contractors.

Sell, sell, sell: Yes, this is not simple - but it’s totally critical. With LinkedIn, you can search your network for possible customer leads. “Our platform is based on the importance of trusted sources and connections,” said Blue.

Actually, one approach is to find those people who are moving to a new company. That’s a great segue to contact the person. Perhaps, the company may be interested in your product or service.

Or, suppose you are prospecting a new company — and want to learn more. Well, you can visit the profiles of some of the company’s employees to get a superior sense of the organization, which can be critical in closing a sale.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

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Filed under: Amazon.com (AMZN), Small business

The concept of “collaborative filtering” has been around for a long time. The pioneer is Amazon.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN), which built the system that does things like “if you like this book, you might also like the following titles.” Essentially, this is based on a variety of data sources, such as your purchase history as well as the behavior of similar users.

Well, a startup company, Outbrain, is providing its own flavor of collaborative filtering. In fact, the company has announced a venture capital round of $5 million. The investors include Gemini Israel Funds, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and GlenRock Israel.

The thinking behind Outbrain is that people want to read news stories and articles that those who have similar interests also read and liked. So, through a widget, a news site or blogger can grant users to rank content (using a five-start system).

As more and more people use the system, the story links should become increasingly relevant to the users. It’s based on highly-sophisticated technology known as the Personalized Relevancy Score.

Although it’s really a matter of time to see if this stuff works, Outbrain’s investors are psyched about the deal. According to the Daniel Cohen, a general partner at Gemini Israel Funds: “With a great product and a great entrepreneur, this investment is a no (out)brainer.”

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar On the internet Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

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Filed under: Small business

With all the buzz, it’s actually not simple to define Web 2.0. But, interestingly enough, we are now hearing about Web 3.0.

What does it mean? Well, I’m not sure.

Despite this, get ready for it. In fact, a new entrant will soon hit the market: Twine.

To get things going, the company’s parent - Radar Networks - has snagged $13 million in venture capital. The investors include: Velocity Interactive Group, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Vulcan Capital.

Twine calls Web 3.0 the “Semantic Web.”

Huh?

Think of it as a place to store, discover and share information - along with many others who have similar interests. Essentially, Twine has a super-smart artificial intelligence that helps with the process (basically, it learns from user behavior).

The company plans to have both free and premium versions (the latter will grant for tons of storage). I think it will take time for people to get comfortable with such a new approach, but as the Web increasingly becomes an unmanageable sea of data, services like Twine should be huge beneficiaries.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

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Filed under: Apple Inc (AAPL), Research in Motion (RIMM), Small business

For the tech business people I know, there are two “must haves:” a BlackBerry — Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM)’s smartphone — and a profile on LinkedIn, a social network that has 19 million members.

But, interestingly enough, the two systems haven’t been able to talk to each other - that is, until now.

Today, LinkedIn has launched a mobile version of its service. In fact, not only can you use it with your BlackBerry, but also on Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL)’s iPhone as well as other devices.

What’s more, LinkedIn has added language support for English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese.

However, the mobile edition is in the beta phase and as a result, the feature set is somewhat limited. For example, you can’t accept an invitation or even update your profile. Yet, I’m sure LinkedIn will continue to evolve the product and get a sense of user behavior over time — which has been a hallmark of the company over the years.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar On the internet Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

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Filed under: Products and services, Management, Industry, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, eBay (EBAY), Marketing and advertising, Small business

For the past several years, eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) has pretty much cornered the market for on the internet auctions. It has created such big barriers of entry, that smaller sites have difficulty breaking into the market. But this week’s seller boycott on eBay has opened the door for some smaller companies.

We took a look earlier this week at the reasons behind the current eBay strike. We made note at that time, that some of your more massive name competitors, such as Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK) were going to be capitalizing on the sellers’ strike, but now we are also starting to hear about gains made in some smaller companies that you may have never heard of before.

In a recent article from Seattle Post-Intelligencer, two Washington-based companies stated they have been loving all the negative attention that eBay has been receiving as of late.

The first company that the article mentions is CozyBug.com. Never heard of it? Don’t worry, most people haven’t. This small on the internet site is very similar to eBay, but it focuses on selling items that are too big to ship, or items that people usually want to see first hand before making their buy. The site, while being nationwide in its reach, has been trying to establish itself as the web’s “local online flea market and garage sale”.

Sounds like a great concept, but there has been one problem… luring in eBay users and convincing them to switch to CozyBug. Well, this week eBay’s new policies have become CozyBug’s ideal marketing campaign ever.

Just how much of a difference can a week make? The numbers don’t lie. Before this week, CozyBug has been getting about 10,000 visitors per month. This week traffic has ballooned. Its per day traffic has jumped to 15,000 visitors! In case you were wondering, that’s more than a 4,400% daily increase. Not too shabby.

According to the company’s founder and CEO, David Cantu, “EBay is too big… this was bound to happen…” But how has the increased site traffic translated into members? The site has gained 100 newly registered members so far. OK, I know what you are thinking, 100 new members doesn’t sound like such a big change. Fair enough, but consider that in the previous 10 months that the site has been up and running it had gained a total of 700 members, so this week has seen over a 14% jump in members. Yes, that is a material increase for the site to say the least.

Enough about CozyBug, let’s take a look at the next company, MommyAuctions.com. The eBay strike has boosted the number of items listed for sale on the site from 2,500 to 4,000 this week alone. As far as traffic, the site has seen an increase from 3,630 average visitors in January to a current average of 4,650, a 28% increase.

The real question is, what is going to happen next week? Will eBay users go back to what they know ideal, or can we expect to see some of these migrating sellers staying away from eBay permanently?

If you are an eBay seller that is currently involved in this week’s boycott, I would love to hear your thoughts on this matter. Are you basically planning to just boycott the site this week, and return to business as usual next Monday? What options have you been exploring this week for the selling of your goods, or have you basically just taken the week off and not selling on other sites?

Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last four years working as an analyst for the online investment advisory service Investor’s Observer.

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Filed under: Small business

Last year, I talked to the co-founder and CEO of TrialPay. I was certainly intrigued by his business model … and so are venture capitalists.

This week the company announced a $12.7 million round of capital. The investors include: Index Ventures, Atomico Ventures and former PayPal executives.

TrialPay has developed a new payments platform, based on its Offer-Matching Technology system. Essentially, the goal is to increase the chances of consumers buying a product (yes, that’s always something that’s interesting).

Here’s how it works: First, you can get a product for free. But, in exchange, you need to buy something from a vendor from TrialPay. There are more than 3,000 of them.

Thus, an advertiser acquires a new customer. Then, a vendor gets paid for a product (from the advertiser). And, more importantly, the consumer gets something for free.

No doubt, this isn’t easy to pull off. Basically, TrialPay had to spend lots of time developing a system to allow for the right kind of offers.

So far, though, it seems to be getting traction. TrialPay has 5.2 million registered users, with more than 15,000 new signups every day.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar On the internet Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

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Filed under: Oracle Corp (ORCL), Small business

One of the killer apps - in the software world - is the relational database. Yet, such things can be quite complex and pricey, as seen with solutions from Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) and IBM (NYSE: IBM).

But now we’re seeing consumer databases, which also leverage cool aspects of social media. Take blist, which announced that it has snagged $6.5 million in venture capital. The investors include: Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures.

Gary Morgenthaler, who is a principal at Morgenthaler Ventures, has extensive experience in the database world. After all, he was the co-founder and CEO of Ingres and Illustra, which are two top databases.

As for the blist system, it can have seemingly endless applications. You might want to use it for tracking a wedding list; or a group of favorite websites; or fantasy football stats; and so on. What’s more, you can share the information with other on the web friends or colleagues.

More importantly, you don’t need to be a tech whiz to use it. As testament to this, there are more than 10,000 users so far.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

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Filed under: Cisco Systems (CSCO), Dell (DELL), Starbucks (SBUX), Intel (INTC), International Business Machines (IBM), salesforce.com inc (CRM), Small business

One of my favorite books is Patricia Seybold’s Outside Innovation. Her main point is that much of a company’s innovation will come outside its walls — such as from employees, partners, investors, and so on.

For example, the hip online clothing retailer, Karmaloop, gets about 40% of its brand ideas from its customers. Of course, the biggies — like International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Cisco Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE: CRM), Intel Corporation (Nasdaq: INTC) and Dell, Inc. (Nasdaq: DELL) — also operate idea sites.

In the case of Cisco, the company has established the I-Prize competition so as to find the next billion-dollar idea. The company says it might invest up to $10 million into the winning idea.

So what can your company do to benefit from other people’s ideas? Let’s take a look:

Use Web 2.0: Let’s face it, people like to interact in the online world, such as with ratings, comments, reviews, and tagging. This makes things fun but also helps to create superior content and community.

Rewards: So what if few people don’t participate? Well, you can find ways to provide incentives. That is, you might think of having weekly or monthly prizes for the best ideas. Prizes don’t have to be extravagant. A easy Starbucks Corporation (Nasdaq: SBUX) gift card can be a nice gesture.

Be Prepared: At the same time, what if you get a flood of ideas?

“To make things work,” stated Matthew Greeley, the founder and CEO of BrightIdea.com, “you superior be prepared to respond, otherwise you’ll lose the essential trust.”

What platform? There are a variety of systems you can use to operates your idea site. Perhaps the easiest approach is to have a forum discussion page. However, you’ll not get the Web 2.0 features.

But, there are web-based systems that are especially designed for harnessing and managing ideas, such as BrightIdea.com. And yes, the company offers a small business version of its Webstorm product.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar On the web Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.

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Filed under: Small business

I recently talked to an MBA student who wanted to begin his own business. But his goals involved more than making money - that is, he wanted to do something “good for the world.”

From what I can tell, this “social entrepreneurialism” is gaining traction.

And, yes, we are seeing this reflected on the Web. Look at The Point, which operates a group action network. So, if you want to organize fund-raising, a boycott, rallies or anything else, you can leverage the platform.

What’s more, The Point just raised $4.8 million from New Enterprise Associates (NEA).

True, the social networking space looks fairly saturated. Yet, I think The Point is a natural for creating strong communities.

The Point’s founder and CEO, Andrew Mason, also wrote about the funding in his blog - saying “Hey, we raised a bunch of money!”

He also has a picture of the original business plan, which was put on the back of a napkin.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar On the web Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

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