Venture capital drives high-tech value
Tim Chang is principle of Norwest Venture Partners and a heavy hitter in the world of high-tech venture capital.
New StartupNation Radio Show for Entrepreneurs to Premiere This Weekend on WJR-AM 760
Birmingham, MI (PRWEB) December 06, 2013
StartupNation.com, a leading online resource for entrepreneurs, has announced the re-launch of a new radio show for entrepreneurs and small business owners on greater Detroit’s WJR 760AM. Hosted by Jeff Sloan and Dan Glisky, the StartupNation radio show will premiere on Saturday, December 7 at 2-3pm EST and will focus on real-world startup and business growth advice.
The StartupNation radio show format will feature listener call-ins, along with interviews of successful business leaders. The inaugural show will feature an interview with Dan Gilbert, Founder and Chairman of Quicken Loans, the nation’s largest online home lender, and the majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers. Listeners can expect to hear action-oriented and inspirational guidance to help them start and grow a business of their own.
“The StartupNation radio show is about entrepreneurship and people achieving their dreams, by starting their own business. Many entrepreneurs have a business idea in their minds but are not sure how they can turn their idea into a real business,” states Sloan, co-founder and CEO of StartupNation. “Our radio show will demonstrate that entrepreneurial dreams can come true – and we’ll be giving entrepreneurs tangible tips, strategies and guidance to get them going in the right direction.”
In addition to spearheading many small businesses himself, Sloan also served as co-founder of the Michigan Venture Capital Association and Digital Detroit, both non-profit organizations promoting Michigan’s high tech and venture communities. Sloan was also a winner of a 2013 Small Business Influencer “Champion Award”. Glisky is President and COO of StartupNation and is a serial entrepreneur with experience in launching technology, media, import, distribution, security and marketing companies. Consistently leading award-winning growth companies, Glisky was named one of the top 100 emerging business leaders in greater Detroit.
StartupNation’s mission is to catalyze the launch of one million new businesses in the coming 10 years. The launch of the radio show is an important extension of the brand to reach additional would-be entrepreneurs as well as current business builders in pursuit of this mission. In addition to the broadcast on WJR 760AM, the show will be streamed on the StartupNation website at http://www.startupnation.com/radio.
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About StartupNation:
StartupNation has over 130,000 members, more than 3 million annual users, and over 200,000 pages of business advice, resources and networking opportunities for entrepreneurs. StartupNation was founded by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, with the intention of providing a one-stop shop for entrepreneurial success, including articles, blogs, tools, coaching, forums, award-winning step-by-step advice, and more.
About the StartupNation’s Founders – The Sloan Brothers:
StartupNation co-founders and “chief startupologists,” Rich and Jeff Sloan, are two of the country’s leading small business experts. The Sloan brothers speak frequently at entrepreneurial forums and act as sources for top media venues nationwide. They are authors of StartupNation: Open for Business, published by Doubleday, and provide their insight online at StartupNation.com. The Sloan brothers are regularly quoted and featured in media such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune Small Business, Entrepreneur Magazine, CNN, PBS, CNBC, MSNBC, FOX News and many others.
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BusinessRadioX
Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) December 06, 2013
On Wednesday, December 11, 2013, BusinessRadioX® welcomes to the studio the latest addition to its radio family, ATL Film Talk, hosted by Krista Berutti from our studio in Sandy Springs.
ATL Film Talk is a show spotlighting local film industry professionals and sponsors about their business and services, event, organization, or production. Berutti will lead an informative discussion with industry experts who share tips, tricks, and the process of different stages in a production. Listeners are encouraged to submit topics or guests they would like to hear on the show. Starting January 3, 2014, you can catch ATL Film Talk at its regular time of 11:30am on Fridays.
Atlanta and the state of Georgia have become a hub for filmmaking in recent years. The city and the state offer highly desirable financial incentives, location diversity, production resources and professional support to make any size production a possibility.
Berutti brings over ten years of sales, marketing, and management experience in various avenues of the film industry including recording studios, sound design/audio post-production companies, and working with individual artists. Berutti moved to Atlanta in 2008 to attend The Art Institute for Audio Production. In addition to her studies she also managed traffic for the school’s five studios, worked as a TA, and held the position of Vice Chair for the Audio Engineering Society Atlanta Student Chapter. Berutti currently works in the local indie film scene as a Supervising Sound Editor and as a music publisher [Capture Publishing] for film.
“Krista brings a unique perspective to the fast-growing world of filmmaking in Atlanta, and this show will be an excellent addition to our studio line-up,” said Stone Payton, co-founder of BusinessRadioX®.
Join us for this inaugural episode at 11:30am Eastern on Wednesday, December 11th, on ATL Film Talk.
About Business RadioX®:
BusinessRadioX® interviews dozens of innovative entrepreneurs and successful leaders each week. Its mission is to help local businesses Get The Word Out about the important work they’re doing for their market, their community, and their profession. With a pro-business slant and a long-form interview format, guests don’t have to worry about being ambushed or talking in “sound bites.” Guests have enough time to tell their whole story and to share their insights and experience without interruptions. BusinessRadioX® hosts are business professionals interviewing their peers, drilling down on the critical issues, and delivering practical information to an engaged business audience. Business topics that are frequently covered include: Law, Finance, Healthcare, Technology, Trade Shows, B2B Marketing, Venture Capital, Training and Development and other issues impacting the business community. For more information, visit: http://www.businessradiox.com.
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Sean Seton-Rogers, venture capital fund Benchmark Capital
recorded @ TMT.Ventures ’07 Warsaw – the most interesting event for venture capital and private equity industry in Central Europe.
Video Rating: 5 / 5
John Saddington Talks with The Sales Whisperer
Temecula, CA (PRWEB) December 08, 2013
John Saddington told Wes Schaeffer, The Sales Whisperer®, that becoming an entrepreneur was not in his plan. After barely graduating from college, he went to work for Dell and later Fox News, quickly rising through the corporate ranks in both companies, which was his career plan. However, as he learned more about that world, the less respect he had for authority and realized that he could “do it better and faster.”
Since John left the corporate world and began building his own products in 2006, he has had a number of startups, has raised venture capital for others, and got his big break with Flash development. He had the idea for 8Bit around 2008, which came from his frustration in building sites for his clients. In 2012, Saddington began kicking around the idea for Pressgram because he was not satisfied with terms on other sites.
He also shares with Schaeffer how he funds projects through Kickstarter and Indiegogo. John tells Wes, “Entrepreneurs get frozen with ideas. We need to force the idea of scarcity on ourselves so we focus and dig deep and become excellent.” To listen to this fast-paced, idea-filled interview, and learn how to do what John Saddington has been able to do, go to http://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/session20.
About The Sales Whisperer®
Wes Schaeffer is The Sales Whisperer®, a sales and marketing industry leader who works with and specializes on the Infusionsoft sales and marketing automation platform. He and his Certified Infusionsoft Consultants at The Sales Whisperer® educate and train clients on sales and marketing practices, social media marketing, CRM, SEO and SEM usages, motivational speaking, and more.
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Huddle wins at UK Tech Awards 2013 and Alastair Mitchell, CEO, named one of Computer Weeklys Ten Rising Stars
San Francisco, California (PRWEB) December 07, 2013
Huddle, the cloud content collaboration supplier, has continued its award success as the company received the award for “Emerging Star of the Year” at the UK Tech Awards 2013. In addition, the company’s CEO Alastair Mitchell has been selected as one of Computer Weekly’s “Ten Rising Stars” at the publication’s CW Tech 50 Awards.
Huddle’s latest accolades follow on from a series of recent award wins. These include ‘Supplier of the Year’ at Computer Weekly’s European User Awards for Enterprise Software, Gold Stevie Award Winner in the Business / Government category, Bronze Stevie Winner in the Computer Services category, and the Markie award for “Metrics that Matter”. The company was also shortlisted as a finalist for the UK IT Industry Awards 2013 and the SuperNova Awards 2013.
“To win at the UK Tech Awards and then have Alastair named as one of Computer Weekly’s ten rising stars is a real honor and it’s great that all the hard work we’re doing at Huddle is being recognized by so many people,” says Chris Boorman, CMO, Huddle. “We’re transforming the way that people work, giving them technology needed to work effectively across departments, teams and organizations, rather than just within them. Huddle brings teams that are working together into one secure, central environment that can be accessed from any location, on any device.”
Founded in 2006, Huddle now has offices in London, San Francisco, New York and Washington. It was co-founded by Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin when they became frustrated with the existing enterprise technology’s inability to help people work together. Through their leadership, Huddle has raised in excess of $ 40 million in funding and is now used by more than 100,000 enterprise and government organizations worldwide. Globally recognized brands such as Panasonic Europe, Grant Thornton, P&G, Kia Motors and Unilever, as well as 80% of central UK government departments, use Huddle to share and work on content with teams inside and outside of their organizations.
Huddle’s next generation content collaboration platform was developed to tackle key problems in the enterprise: security being compromised, content overwhelming enterprise, legacy software failing to cope, leading to failed deployments and making it difficult to work together.
About Huddle
Huddle provides next generation content collaboration for government and enterprises. Its patent-pending intelligent technology ensures relevant content is delivered directly to Huddle users, with no need to search. Business units of any size work more efficiently by huddling together within a secure cloud service accessed via web browsers, desktop or mobile devices. Co-headquartered in London and San Francisco and with offices in New York City, Huddle’s customers include 80 percent of Fortune 500 and 80 percent of UK government departments, as well as companies such as Kia Motors, Unilever and P&G. The company is privately held and backed by leading venture capital firms in the US and Europe.
More information can be found at http://www.huddle.com
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Hypo Venture Capital – Funds: Why This Could be the Answer Your Looking For!
Here at Hypo Venture Capital we are committed to offering our clients access to the latest and broadest range of financial services and products on the market. We know that choosing the right strategy, the right investment and the right product is no easy task in this day and age! Whether its advice, investments or financial planning we are here to answer all your questions and facilitate all your financial needs.
Here we look to dispel some of the jargon and confusion surrounding ‘Funds’, breaking them down, with no nonsense explanations in an attempt to help you understand this strategic investment.
Starting out?
Many newcomers to equity investment are nervous about investing in individual firms – and with good reason. Putting all your money into a few stocks is a high-risk strategy, especially for the inexperienced, because it leaves you vulnerable to sharp fluctuations in the share price of the individual stocks you pick, not the markets in which they trade. If you get it right and pick winners, great. But if you pick a couple of big losers, your whole portfolio will be scuppered. Collective or ‘pooled’ investments can diversify your holdings and therefore reduce that risk.
Why pooled funds?
Unit trusts, open-ended investment companies (Oeics, pronounced ‘oiks’) and investment trusts are all vehicles that let you pool your money with lots of other ‘retail’ – or small – investors. (In the US, this kind of investment is known as a ‘mutual fund’.) The pooled money is then invested on your behalf in a wide range of different equities by specialist fund managers. (There are also funds that invest in bonds or other assets, such as commercial property or commodities.) The fund manager takes a fee to run the fund and research what stocks to buy.
If they get it right, it means you get access to a highly diversified range of stocks at a reasonable cost. It also gives you easy access to asset classes and international markets that would otherwise be difficult and/or expensive to invest in. For example, specialist funds are available that invest only in Japan, or Latin America, or only in technology firms, and so on. Also, different funds are designed to meet different investment objectives and there’s a wide range to choose from. Some aim for income, some for capital growth, and some for a balance of the two.
Unit trusts and Oeics
Until recently, unit trusts were the main kind of collective retail investment in the UK. With a unit trust, you buy a fixed number of units in a fund, which then rise and fall according to the value of the underlying assets the trust invests in. Over the past few years, many fund managers have converted their unit trusts into Oeics in the belief that investors find them simpler to understand. From the point of view of the investor, Oeics are more or less the same as unit trusts; they are ‘open-ended’ in the sense that (like unit trusts) the fund’s size expands and contracts depending on investor demand. The big difference is that Oeics have only one price (as opposed to the dual bid/offer pricing of unit trusts).
Investment trusts
Like Oeics, investment trusts are firms whose business is to invest in the shares of other companies. But unlike unit trusts and Oeics, investment trusts are ‘closed-ended’: there are a fixed number of shares in issue, which are traded on the stock exchange. The purpose of an investment trust is, broadly speaking, the same as an Oeic – to give smaller investors cheap access to a wide range of shares. But they are structured rather differently.
The fact that investment trust shares are traded on the open market (the London Stock Exchange) means the share price is determined not just by the value of the trust’s underlying assets, but by current market demand for its shares. Sometimes, if an investment trust is popular, it will trade at a premium to its net asset value (NAV). Other times, it will be trading at a discount.
Investment trusts can borrow money (called “gearing”), often up to 10%-15% of the value of assets and use it to invest in the markets. This is great if the markets go up, but of course the funds losses escalate if they fall.
The final significant difference is that investment trusts are cheaper to buy than unit trusts or Oeics. Actively managed unit trusts have upfront fees of anything up to 5%-6% of the investment, plus an annual management fee of around 1.5%. By contrast, charges on investment trusts are typically less than 1%.
Passive or active?
One way of minimising the cost is to go for an index-tracking fund. These funds aim to match or ‘track’ the performance of a given market index, such as the FTSE All-Share or the FTSE 100. They do this using computer programs to work out how much of each individual stock they need to buy and sell to mimic the performance of the index as a whole.
That’s much cheaper than employing lots of expensive ‘experts’ and researchers, so index-trackers are much cheaper than ‘actively-managed’ funds. Index-trackers might seem like a safety-first option, but there’s a great deal of research evidence to suggest that they outperform most actively managed funds over the long-run because their charges are so low (typically 0.5%, or even less).
Another good ‘passive’ form of pooled investment is the exchange-traded fund (ETF). These work like index-trackers, in that they target a particular market or sector index, but are traded as shares, allowing for a cheap and highly flexible investment.
Want to know more?
Hypo Venture Capital is an independent investment advisory firm which focuses on global equities and options markets. Our analytical tools, screening techniques, rigorous research methods and committed staff provide solid information to help our clients make the best possible investment decisions. All views, comments, statements and opinions are of the authors. For more information go to www.hypovc.com
Hypo Venture Capital is an independent investment advisory firm which focuses on global equities and options markets. Our analytical tools, screening techniques, rigorous research methods and committed staff provide solid information to help our clients make the best possible investment decisions. All views, comments, statements and opinions are of the authors. For more information go to www.hypovc.com
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Hypo Venture Capital Headlines: Is the global economy back on an even keel?
http://www.thenational.ae/news/worldwide/asia-pacific/is-the-global-economy-back-on-an-even-keel
Day rates for the movement of goods around the world hit their peak in early 2008, a few months before the global financial crisis. Which direction are these same prices heading in now, and can the shipping industry help predict the direction of the global economy?
Day rates for the movement of goods around the world hit their peak in early 2008, a few months before the global financial crisis. Which direction are these same prices heading in now, and can the shipping industry help predict the direction of the global economy?
Munshi Ahmed / Bloomberg
A port in Singapore. Around 90 per cent of all the world’s goods are transported by sea, meaning that when economic activity is strong, the shipping industry is buoyant.
A port in Singapore. Around 90 per cent of all the world’s goods are transported by sea, meaning that when economic activity is strong, the shipping industry is buoyant.
Bloomberg
Khalifa Industrial Zone Abu Dhabi, which is being constructed between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, is one of the largest infrastructure projects in the world.
Khalifa Industrial Zone Abu Dhabi, which is being constructed between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, is one of the largest infrastructure projects in the world.
Forty-two floors up, from the window of Mercator’s meeting room, Singapore stretches out, a landscape of order, dotted with trees and water.
To the south, a haze of humidity hangs on the horizon, reducing the Indonesian islands to no more than an outline. Ships, trawlers and tankers sit between these two points, like toys in a bath, motionless in their motion. These are some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, the blue of the ocean endlessly crossed by small black lines, keeping the economy of the world moving.
In the meeting room far above the sea, K Srivastava, a vice president of Mercator in Singapore, is explaining why the company he works for adopted a cautious approach during the heady days of the first half of 2008.
“We could see the cracks,” he says, “We could see the cracks very visibly because the day rates were so high. That on a long-term basis with that kind of day rates, one wonders whether any business can be sustainable.”
Mercator is one of the world’s leading dry bulk shipping companies, a company that moves vast quantities of dry goods – grains, coal, iron ore – around the world, servicing the factories and industries that keep the global economy moving.
Back in 2008, in the months before the financial markets collapsed, the per-day price for moving a shipment was vast. Companies such as Mercator were making huge profits. By one estimate, the shipping industry made an estimated US$ 80 billion (Dh294bn) in profits in 2004. But something didn’t quite add up.
“We found the day rates were too high, [too] unrealistic. The day rates were about $ 80,000 (Dh294,000) to $ 100,000 in the peak of times. So everybody who has a ship was earning $ 100,000 per day. Now that has a couple of implications. Operating costs for a ship are typically in the range of $ 5,000 per day. If you were to say you are earning $ 100,000 and operating costs are $ 5,000 … it’s still a lot of money. And therefore something had to be bizarre there.”
Mercator’s reaction to this situation was to hold fast, not taking on loans or debts. The day rates, notes Srivastava, were at their highest level for a decade. Other indexes were also high, at record levels. The Baltic Dry Index (BDI), a measure of the daily average cost to ship dry bulk commodities, was at record levels.
Hypo Venture Capital Zurich Financial News and latest headlines – Hypo Venture Capital Zurich, Switzerland is an independent investment advisory firm which focuses on global equities and options markets. Our analytical tools, screening techniques, rigorous research methods and committed staff provide solid information to help our clients make the best possible investment decisions. All views, comments, statements and opinions are of the authors. For more information go to www.hypovc.com.
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