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Posts Tagged ‘Costco’

HP Mini 210 spotted at retail with $350 pricetag

The yet-to-be-confirmed HP Mini 210 has popped up at a couple online retail spots already, but now it seems to have landed in the Real World courtesy of a Costco in Hillsboro, Oregon. We’ve seen the netbook listed at $280, $320 and now $350 pricetags, so we really don’t know who to trust anymore (certainly not our parent’s generation), but the sexy design, chiclet keyboard and unibutton trackpad certainly smack of progress.

[Thanks, Dustin W. who sent this in via our new webOS app!]

HP Mini 210 spotted at retail with $350 pricetag originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 02 Jan 2010 23:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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10 lessons in bootstrapping a business

(Editor’s note: Clate Mask is co-founder and CEO of Infusionsoft. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)

There are two ways to build a business: Raise a bunch of money or bootstrap. When I was in business school, there wasn’t much attention given to the bootstrapping notion. The “MBA way” of growing a business is to write a business plan, raise money and then execute the business plan. But I think that’s almost always the wrong approach.

We bootstrapped Infusionsoft for several years before ever raising capital. The lessons we learned were, and continue to be, invaluable. Here are the top ten lessons we learned from this method – and why I continue to evangelize bootstrapping to entrepreneurs:

10.  You’ll learn you can keep expenses low. In the early days, we learned that many “necessities” are really luxuries. For a long time, we didn’t have a copy machine. We used our fax machine, went paperless and occasionally borrowed our next-door neighbor’s copier. After a couple years, we bought one of those multi-function machines from Costco for a few hundred bucks. Not until we were doing a couple million bucks in annual revenue did we get a “real” copy machine. You can argue whether the copier is a necessity or a luxury, but you can’t argue that we learned to keep expenses low and still effectively do our work.

9.  You’ll manage cash better once you have it. The discipline you develop when bootstrapping will stay with you so that you don’t blow your cash once you’ve got it.

8.  You’ll develop your Minimum Viable Product. When you don’t have a treasure trove of cash, you get the product to market as fast as you can. Good is good enough. You don’t fret perfection. And you don’t waste resources “guessing” what your customer wants. You get it in the customer’s hands as quickly as possible. Infusionsoft began as a custom software company so we developed our sales and marketing automation software with feedback from our customers. Our R&D came directly from their input and as a result our product, with every release met the customers’ needs more and more.

7.  You’ll know you’ve got a real business… before wasting OPM (Other People’s Money). I’ve just never felt comfortable taking an investor’s money if I don’t know I can multiply it. If you don’t bootstrap, you’re taking a serious risk with someone else’s money.

6.  You’ll employ missionaries instead of mercenaries. You don’t have the big bucks to pay the hired gun. You can only afford to hire passionate people who really believe in the cause – and that’s a great thing. In a startup, passionate employees almost always outperform experienced corporate types who command big bucks.

5.  You’ll stay focused on your core business. Raising capital can take more time than selling and servicing your customers. If you try to raise money too soon, you’re probably going to take your eye off the ball and leave your customers hanging. You might actually bring in more cash by spending your time with prospects and customers. Plus, you’ll raise money faster and easier after bootstrapping. Investors get excited about investing in a business that’s generating a lot of revenue and hasn’t raised any money from investors.

4.  You’ll retain the equity in your business. Once you raise capital, you’re giving up some ownership in your company. The longer you can avoid raising the capital, the bigger the piece of the pie you’ll own down the road. For this reason, if no other, you’ll want to hold off raising capital for as long as you can.

3.  You’ll retain control of your business. Investors have wants, needs and demands. Once you take their money, you need to answer to them. In the best case, they take up some of your time. In the worst case, they force your hand or move you out. Don’t bring on investors until you can multiply their money and thereby keep them happy.

2.  You’ll learn to sell. When you don’t have cash in the bank, you’d better know how to sell. It’s amazing how many entrepreneurs who raise capital are great in academic discussions but terrible on a sales call. The art of persuasion is not what business school is teaching, but it’s what drives the success of the business.

Often when you have raised VC, it’s easy to fall into the “strategy” trap. That’s where the team spends most of its time engaging in relentless discussions on strategy and big ‘game-changing’ things, which is fine, but who’s selling? When you haven’t raised venture capital, you get your butt on the phone and you persuade people to buy your stuff. When you bootstrap, you learn that selling—while it may not be glamorous—is what drives the business.

1.  You’ll listen to your customers. Bootstrapped companies learn from the very beginning that their customers—not their investors—sign the paychecks. They listen, they adjust and they care – because they have to. There is no other way if the bootstrapped company wants to survive. This fundamental concept is at the heart of why bootstrapped companies are stronger companies in the long run. They cultivate from the very beginning, and they ingrain in their DNA, a strong desire to serve the customer.

So, what did I leave out? What have you learned from bootstrapping? And when do you think it’s time to move from the bootstrapping game to the OPM game?

Photo by star5112 via Flickr

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Xbox 360 Modern Warfare 2 bundle nabs November 10th release date

Call it coincidence or call it fate, but precisely a week after Sony’s extra-capacious 250GB PlayStation 3 Slim hits the States for $349.99, Microsoft’s 250GB Xbox 360 Modern Warfare 2 bundle will arrive with a game and a pair of black wireless controllers for $399.99. Both Costco and Amazon have a November 10th ship date listed for the package, though oddly enough, neither site lists the machine as coming with a component cable. It’s standard def or bust, y’all.

[Thanks, Manoj]

Read – Costo’s listing
Read – Amazon’s listing

Filed under: Gaming

Xbox 360 Modern Warfare 2 bundle nabs November 10th release date originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 18 Oct 2009 01:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Holiday Outlook for eReaders and eBooks: Even Better Than Previously Thought

There can be little doubt that eBook and eReaders are having a breakout year. Today, Forrester Research moved its original projection of 2 million US eReader sales in 2009 up 50%. Forrester now expects that 3 million eReaders will be sold in 2009 and that 30% of these will sell during the holiday season. Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps argues that sales are growing much faster than expected because of falling prices, better retail distribution, and the media buzz that currently surrounds eBooks and eReaders. For 2010, Forrester projects eReader sales of up to 10 million.

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Now that the competition among eReader manufacturers is heating up, a larger number of US retailers, including Best Buy, Costco, Target and Walmart have started to devote shelf space to eReaders. According to the Association of American Publishers, eBook sales since June have gone up 149% for the year and the industry now generates $14 million in sales every month.

One of the main reasons why Forrester is correcting its forecast is the fact that prices have come down (and this report was actually written before the Amazon announcement). In addition, Forrester also sees increased consumer awareness thanks to the current media buzz around eReaders. While the Kindle was mentioned 8,680 times in news stories in 2008, it has been mentioned over 15,700 times in 2009 already (including the month of September). In addition, the fact that more content is now available and that manufacturers like iRex and Sony are backing the open ePub standard is also opening up the market to buyers who previously weren’t interested in Amazon’s closed Kindle ecosystem.

Outlook for 2010: Even Better

For next year, Forrester expects that Barnes & Noble will become serious competition for Amazon. With the iRex Digital Reader 800 and the forthcoming Plastic Logic reader, B&N will be able to offer its customers a lineup of eReaders that can easily challenge Amazon’s Kindle – though not in the international market that Amazon just entered yesterday.

Forrester also expects that Apple’s mythical tablet could become a major force in the eReader market, though for the time being, the Apple tablet is obviously nothing more than a rumor.

Clearly the eReader market is growing at a rapid pace. Just yesterday, when Amazon unveiled the reduced prices for its Kindle 2 and the launch of the AT&T-powered “U.S. & International Wireless” version of the Kindle 2, Amazon’s CEO and founder Jeff Bezoz pointed out in an interview with the New York Times that whenever Amazon offers both a Kindle and paper version of a book, 48% of total sales now come from the digital Kindle edition. In May, this number was 35%. While Amazon doesn’t release sales numbers for the Kindle, these numbers are only possible if Amazon has sold a lot more Kindles than most analysts previously thought.

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SpeedTrack Sues Just About Every Major Online Retailer Over Patent Infringement

Can you spell “patent troll”?

Software developer SpeedTrack has filed suit against nearly two dozen major online retailers, including Amazon.com, Best Buy, Overstock.com, Nike, Costco and Dell, accusing the major online retailers of infringing some patent that supposedly covers a search mechanism customers can use to locate products on their websites.

The complaint, filed yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses the defendants of infringing U.S. Patent Number 5,544,360, titled “Method for accessing computer files and data, using linked categories assigned to each data file record on entry of the data file record”.

Dubbed GIA (Guided Information Access), originally developed and patented by SpeedTrack co-founder and CTO Jerzy Lewak, the system is designed to guide users to contextually relevant information when searching specific , ensuring a result rather than a page that says “no result can be found” or whatever. According to its website, law enforcement agencies like police departments use SpeedTrack’s GIA software to sort through massive criminal records data, which supposedly helps them solve crimes faster.

Evidently, this type of software is important for Internet retailers’ conversion rates, because such technology enables users to discover related or similar products on their websites when specific items cannot be found. But I can hardly imagine that SpeedTrack’s technology is so unique that the e-commerce giants should have to pay as much as a penny to the software company it.

Message to Lewak and the rest of the SpeedTrack team: how about you focus on sales to mark up your balance sheets rather than turning to courts in the hopes that Amazon and co will come fill your pockets for you.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Ooma dials up $18.3M for free landlines via VoIP

Ooma, provider of a voice-over-internet box that lets users make free land-line calls, brought in $18.3 million in a fourth round of venture financing, reports paidContent. It raised $14 million of this sum back in June.

Based in Palo Alto, Calif., the company says it now sells its box, priced at $249.99 a pop, through 5,000 retailers like BestBuy, Costco and others.

Ooma has now raised $61.0 million to date. The recent round came from Worldview Technology Partners, Founders Fund, TD Fund and WI Harper. Previous backers include Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Draper Richards.

As VentureBeat reported in June, Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s stake was converted into common stock, and the firm lost some of its rights, exposing it to further dilution in the future. At that time, the company was valued at $20 million and was looking to raise $20 million total.

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Don’t let retailer’s lights distract you from buying the right HDTV

In case you hadn’t already learned your lesson and started checking behind the displays while HDTV shopping, the HD Guru points out another element of the in-store experience that throws off buyers (and likely contributes to the LCD vs. plasma choices we find so infuriating): lighting. In case you don’t recall from your last trek to a big box superstore, the lighting is quite often stuck on blinding making it nearly impossible to discern any difference in picture quality between televisions, specifically in terms of contrast and black levels (the pictures above are of the same value priced display, at left, under normal home lighting, at right, how it looks under some store lighting setups.) Tested with an illuminance meter, all the stores (except Best Buy’s Magnolia showrooms) averaged well above home ambient lighting levels, with Wal-Mart and Costco measuring the highest at 411.66 and 742.77 lux. Still, there’s tips on how to get a good idea of a TV’s black levels even under those circumstances, plus some choice words left over for the incredible (and useless) dynamic contrast ratio numbers every manufacturer trots out these days, so go ahead and get educated.

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Don’t let retailer’s lights distract you from buying the right HDTV originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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