http://omnisio.com/startupschool08

http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/97554/Startup_School

Peter Norvig, Paul Graham, Marc Andreessen, Mike Arrington, Jeff Bezos, David Heinemeier Hansson, etc.

Lojic Technologies is gearing up for new business projects. I finally got around to putting up a portfolio page with a few past projects.

http://www.lojic.com/portfolio/

We’re currently offering a 10% referral fee, so if you become aware of businesses or individuals in need of web sites or web applications, let me know. Once my referral advertising system is completed (in the next few weeks), we’ll integrate it with the corporate site to track referrals automatically.

Brian

I created Lojic Technologies in 1998. Over the years I have occasionally worked full time at the company while consulting, and at other times I just kept it active to be available in the future. Since I’ve never needed to market myself, I simply threw a web site together as a placeholder.

Now that I’ve been full time with Lojic Technologies since October ‘06 working on several web applications, I’m getting to the point of needing a better web presence, so last Saturday, with some help from my right brained wife, I gave the old site a face lift. It’s still small, and simple, but I think it looks a bit better now.

Besides the cosmetic changes, I also moved from a static site to Ruby on Rails and switched to XHTML 1.0 Strict.

Old Version

New Version www.lojic.com

I’ve also added a link in the sidebar now that the site isn’t an embarrassment. I’m quite pleased with how easy it was to get a Rails app running on Bluehost. I already host this wordpress blog there, so I thought it might be difficult adding a Rails app into the mix without clobbering each other, but it was quite simple (after spending hours researching it )

The site is almost entirely static except for the contact form. I finally arrived at a nice way to host a (mostly) static site with Rails, but I’ll have to blog about that in a later entry.

Business 2.0 has an article on How to Succeed in 2007 “We asked 50 of the brightest minds in business how they do what they do - and how you can cash in on their advice in the year ahead.”

Here are a few snippets. There seems to be an inverse correlation between the value of the advice and the age of the company.

Sergey Brin
Co-founder, Google

Simplicity is an important trend we are focused on. Technology has this way of becoming overly complex, but simplicity was one of the reasons that people gravitated to Google initially.

Richard Branson
Founder and Chairman, Virgin Group

That may well be pragmatically right, but I still think it’s morally wrong, and I suspect that anything that is morally wrong is ultimately bad for business.

Howard Schultz
Chairman, Starbucks

In the early years, we tried everything we could to exceed the expectations of our customers. But we knew that to achieve that goal we had to first exceed the expectations of our people.

Chad Hurley
Co-founder, YouTube

Listen to the community and adapt. We had a lot of our own ideas about how the service would evolve. Coming from PayPal and eBay, we saw YouTube as a powerful way to add video to auctions, but we didn’t see anyone using our product that way, so we didn’t add features to support it.

Kevin Rose
Founder, Digg

Letting users control your site can be terrifying at first. From day one we were asking ourselves, “What is going to be on the front page today?” You have no idea what the system will produce. But stepping back and giving consumers control is what brought more and more people to the site.

Reed Hastings
Co-founder and CEO, Netflix

Truly brilliant marketing happens when you take something most people think of as a weakness and reposition it so people think of it as a strength.

Helen Greiner
Co-founder and Chairman, iRobot

Venture capitalists like to invest in things that have succeeded before, but when we started iRobot, there weren’t any successes in this industry. We were turned down by every major VC across the country, but we just kept knocking on people’s doors until we found the visionary types who understood our passion and agreed there was a market in the making.

Stewart Butterfield
Co-founder, Flickr

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that there has got to be a reason for what you’re doing. You actually have to care about what you’re doing. The business has to be about something.

Tim O’Reilly
Founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media

1. Be first. This is one of the immutable laws of marketing. Who was the first person to fly across the Atlantic? Lindbergh. Who was the second? No idea.

2. If you can’t be first, create a new category so you can be first. Who was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic? Amelia Earhart. New category. We didn’t have the first Web conference out there, but when we applied “Web 2.0″ to the category, we created something new.