M.I.A. Bad Girls. Best Rap Video ever. Watch loud & in HD. (If you are watching on mobile or an iPad, tough.)

Turns out the best rap video ever made was filmed in Morocco, not LA or Florida.  And two other things that you might not expect – she is a Tamil Sri Lankan.

Best Pole Dance ever. This is safe for work (unless you work at Taliban HQ). It will probably make you feel totally inadequate.

Even though I have good Polish friends, Pole Dancing isn’t my thing but that is Olympic standard athleticism.

Extreme formation flying nanorotor display team.

20 of these things flying in tight formation is scary enough… The singularity is one step closer.

This was a particularly pleasant conversation with a lovely fellow. His Dad is quite a nice guy too…

This is the Wordle of the raw text file of the S1 filing.

The SEC’s site went down under the sheer weight of journalists and pundits wanting to know how much Mark Zuckerberg earns and is worth (not a huge amount as it turns out though most of his salary is spent on private jets and a huge amount – $28billion odd if the valuation on IPO is $100billion). They could have done with calling Rackspace to solve that one but we were struck by the amount of markup in an S1 – so much that you can’t even see Facebook…

Don’t miss our next CEO Tales!

• Joel Spolsky, CEO of Stack Exchange, 20th February, Cambridge, 6-8pm.

Is mobile a part of your business?

• MiM2012, March 22nd is a one day forum in London for big companies who are literally mobilising – ITV, FT, Telegraph, RBS, RIM, LivingSocial, Google, Tesco and others. You get to meet investors and some of the best mobile companies presenting to compete for the second MiM Award. EARLY BIRD rate 1 available to 6th February.

Now, grab a coffee, or better yet, a lovely pint of London Pride, and enjoy!

CEO Tales: Eric Ries, The Lean Startup in London – the ‘Justin Bieber of startups’ talks.

CEO Tales: Eric Ries, The Lean Startup in London – Questions, answers and some coaching.

And some post event crowd reaction…

If you want to see some of the other feedback from this session, some of the press write ups and blogs are here. Let us know if we missed any.

Here are Eric’s Slides.

Now, don’t be silly! You won’t want to miss these little puppies…

Our next CEO Tales!

• Joel Spolsky, CEO of Stack Exchange, 20th February, , C, Cambridge.

Is mobile a part of your business?

• MiM2012, March 22nd is a one day forum in London for big companies who are literally mobilising – ITV, FT, Telegraph, RBS, RIM, LivingSocial, Google, Tesco and others. You get to meet investors and some of the best mobile companies presenting to compete for the second MiM Award. EARLY BIRD rate 1 available to 6th February.

Join us at the forthcoming MiM 2012, 22nd March, London for intelligent debate and quality networking with the most influential people in mobile. We will be joined by Ann Cook, Controller of Interactivity and Managing Director, ITL – who will share insights about how content owners are profiting from mobile and reveal where the media industry can learn from others.

If you are a content owner and want to find out how to build sustainable, profitable relationships with your audience, then you need to be at the MiM 2012. If you come and don’t feel you get value, we’ll refund the price of your ticket – that’s how we roll.

Ann will be joined by senior executives from The Telegraph Media Group, RBS, RIM, LivingSocial, Google, Tesco and others who are making mobile happen in their businesses. They have promised to share stories of success, failure and industry insight in an informal, free of corporate-nonsense environment. MiM 2012 isn’t just about listening to others – it’s about the quality delegates you meet on the day. If you haven’t been to a BLN event before click here to see what others say.

Click here to go the MiM Forum website, learn more and book your ticket. EARLY BIRD RATES available until 6th February.

We’re always happy to spread the word…

About the Programme The Entrepreneur Programme is a unique resource for success – a transformative programme designed by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs who want to become dominant players in their sectors.

Format 6-day workshop and a 2-month programme of custom mentoring with the opportunity to tap into Astia’s global network of angels, VCs, corporations, and entrepreneurs that is Astia.

Who should apply? Exceptional women-led high growth startups who know that success is not just about raising money but about growing a business and thriving even in today’s tough market.

Key Dates:

• Call for Applications – 1 December 2011
• Deadline for Applications – 4 February 2012
• In Person Screening – 22 February 2012
• Entrepreneur Programme – 19-24 March 2012

Astia will be working with their next class of outstanding high-growth companies in Cambridge, UK. To apply, please visit: http://www.astia.org/content/view/600/877/ Or contact Astia Vice President, Europe simone@astia.org

Qualification Criteria

• An innovative idea in a high-growth sector such as Technology, Life Sciences, Clean Tech, or high-growth Consumer
• A high-growth investment opportunity – at any stage of growth
• An exceptional team and business strategy
• A significant market opportunity
• A defendable competitive advantage
• At least one woman in a leadership role (at C level) or in significant position of equity

About Astia Astia is a connected global community dedicated to the success of women-led, high-growth ventures.   Astia programming delivers access to networks and opportunities that high-growth entrepreneurs uniquely need to succeed, including connecting entrepreneurs to serial entrepreneurs, investors, industry leaders, advisors and service providers.

Take a ten pence piece (other coins work equally well). Toss the coin to decide the outcome you will pursue.

In the split second that you flip the coin, you will know which outcome is right for you.

Then trust your gut and JFDI.

Quality networking, quality conversation and a rare opportunity to hear from, meet and question one of the most brilliant minds and extraordinary speakers in the software business.

When Rory Sutherland, voted one of the top 10 Ted Speakers of all time says, “Joel is a genius“, you know you are in for a treat. You are. Register quickly or you will miss out. This will be a hugely popular event.

‘Stack Exchange – Building the world’s best online community, one question at a time – a talk and Q&A with Joel Spolsky.’ 

Joel rarely speaks in public but we have been incredibly fortunate that he has spoken at Business of Software on a number of occasions previously so we can share some of his previous talks. In this talk (and a transcript for those in a rush) from Business of Software 2009, Joel flies in the face of what is often accepted as current wisdom and says that building new features does add value to your product. Simplicity is often a way to avoid your customers knowing you are releasing a product without enough features. Features are good if you can add them without making a product too complex. This can create real value for customers and revenue for your business.

About Joel Spolsky

Joel Spolsky is the CEO and co-founder of Stack Exchange, a network of Q&A sites which includes Stack Overflow, used by millions of programmers around the world. He is a globally-recognized expert on the software development process. His website Joel on Software(www.joelonsoftware.com) is popular with software developers around the world and has been translated into over thirty languages. With over 400,000 unique visitors a month, Joel on Software is one of the most popular resources for software developers on the web. He has written four books: User Interface Design for Programmers (Apress, 2001), Joel on Software (Apress, 2004), More Joel on Software(Apress, 2008), and Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent (Apress, 2007). He also edited The Best Software Writing I (Apress, 2005). He also writes a monthly column on entrepreneurship for Inc Magazine.

In 2008, with co-creator Jeff Atwood, Joel launched Stack Overflow, which raised over $18 million in venture capital from Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, and others.

In September 2000, together with co-founder Michael Pryor, Joel started Fog Creek Software in New York City. At Fog Creek Software he created FogBugz, a popular project management system for software teams, Fog Creek Copilot, for providing remote tech support over the Internet, and Trello, a popular project management application.

Joel has worked at Microsoft, where he designed the first version of VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) as a Program Manager on the Excel team, and at Juno Online Services, where he was a technical manager of a team developing an Internet client used by millions of people every day. He spent the early days of the dotcom boom at Viacom, creating a highly optimized application server used for high traffic websites like MTV.com.

Joel graduated from Yale University (Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude) in 1991 with a B.S. and honors in Computer Science. Before college he served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a paratrooper, and he was one of the founders of Kibbutz Hanaton.

Register NOW.

(Please note this is not our normal registration process.)

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We just got this short compilation video of some of the people who came to the BLN CEO Tales event with Eric Ries, The Lean Startup in London. It reminded me that what we are doing is worthwhile. Thank you!

If you know any of the people in the video, please let us know in the comments so we can credit you.

This is probably a really good time to register here so you are the first to hear about our other events. We are just about to announce something in Cambridge on 20th February that might have a similarly profound effect on your life…

• Apple made masses of money. (Hat tip every single person on Twitter. Every tech blog in the world. Really, really well done for spotting that).
• Patagonia, the outdoor clothing company becomes one of California’s first Benefit Corporations. (Hat Tip the excellent and occasionally hirsute Mike McDerment of Freshbooks).
• Bill Gates came to London and said rich people should pay more taxes to help solve the deficit problems.

In a blog comment on a spectacular display of numberbation from TechCrunch, Percy Chow notes with respect to Apple.

“I never thought I’d say this but Apple is a prime example of corporate greed.
How so?
1. Apple does NOT pay it’s stock holders dividends.
2. Apple has NOT given any significant amount of cash to Charity.
3. Apples war chest is nearly $100 billion. In context, the UN said $30 billion would END world hunger.
Even though I am surrounded by Apple products paid for by me, or my company… I’ve only recently become disillusioned with Apple because of these 3 things.”

Apple currently has a $97.4 billion of cash and cash equivalents. $64 billion of which is offshore. As $64 billion man, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer explained in their earnings call, it would cost money (taxes) to bring this into the US. Duh.

• Apple is playing by the rules that the market sets, and winning.

Patagonia, the outdoor clothing company, is changing its company status, “gives directors legal cover to consider social and environmental missions over financial returns.” Currently, shareholders are able to sue companies that don’t maximise profit. Any public company that wants to pursue true environmental, sustainable or social programmes (as opposed to just putting some corporate bollocks at the bottom of your email saying please consider the environment before printing this out), could be sued by shareholders. (Patagonia is a private family held company so doesn’t need to worry so much about class action law suits.)

• Patagonia gets to play by its own rules, and wants to play a part in changing  the rules for everyone’s benefit.

Bill Gates, as an individual, has the potential to be the greatest philanthropist of all time. A man on a mission to solve some of the world’s biggest problems in healthcare. The phenomenal success of his business has given him the freedom to pursue an incredible dream but he is giving his own money away to do so.

• He is applying some of the rules of the corporate world to do what he believes in. He is in a very rare, very responsible position, that he has assumed for himself. Most billionaires don’t.

Something is wrong with the system and people are trying to change it - this is an interesting article from Bloomberg on legal structures for companies that want to change the system. With the number of lawyers cited in the article though, you know this is going to be an expensive business!.

When Eric Ries was in the UK. We talked a little bit about his idea for a third market that aligns the long term interests of shareholders, customers, employees and the rest of the world. He certainly doesn’t believe it is an easy problem to solve, but in 50 years time, it may be the thing that he is remembered for.

Thanks to Frugal Dad for the nice graphic and note. Nicely put…

The first name in wealth for most people is Bill Gates. So imagine how surprised we were to learn that Bill Gates isn’t even close to the wealthiest man in the world — because he’s given almost half of his money to charity. It is even more relevant recently because today he pledged to give $750 million to the global AIDS fund. Through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates is projected to save the lives of 7.6 million children under 5 by 2019 through his support of international vaccinations and healthcare alone. Check out some more statistics and see why we think Bill Gates is better than Batman.

Source: frugaldad.com

One of these is definitely about Springboard.

Deadline for entry into the next programme, to be held in London, is 29th January.

This is what happened to the first crop of Springboard Alumni…

AdWings

• Adwings are building upon their current customers and are in active discussions with a number of key customers about their solution.

Apiary

• Apiary closed an angel investment in December and is currently rolling out their API documentation and testing tools to excited users.  More news to follow very soon.

Arachnys         

• Arachnys completed an angel round in December and have moved from Cambridge to London with plans to grow their team aggressively including high quality devs interested in big data, and multilingual NLP.

Hubflow         

• Hubflow have had a funding offer on the table since October, however they have decided to concentrate on fulfilling their existing customer requirements and completing the sales cycle on three new prospects before they accept funding and expand their team.

Mayday         

• After an initial alpha phase, Mayday is opening the product, which is now an extension of Google Analytics, to a larger audience of beta users. Existing users of Google Analytics can sign up on the website and instantly have access to meaningful and actionable insights on users behaviour.

MiniMonos         

• Since the end of Springboard, MiniMonos has gone from 300,000 registered members to more than 650,000 registered members. The kids’ virtual world also launched branded prepaid cards in Sainsbury stores across the UK and quadrupled its monthly revenue.

PlayMob         

• PlayMob are hosting their first event on 30 January with guest speakers Steve Moore (Big Society), Mick Donegal (Special Effect), Ian Livingstone (Eidos), Andy Payne (UKIE/Mastertronic) and Michael Green (Author of Philanthrocapitalism). PlayMob have also raised a further $3000 for Help USA via Parallel Kingdom and currently have 2 campaigns running in games Drop Catcher (iOS) and Magicats (Facebook). Many more campaigns lined up for Q1 2012 and watch our site for new announcements!

Publification         

• Publification have raised funding from Northstar Ventures and their first Publification eBook will be published later this month.  We are now recruiting A-list authors that want to self-publish and use social discovery and interaction tools to promote their work. Sign up for limited number of beta invites to our spring launch at www.publification.com.

Spontly         

• Spontly completed a funding round and will be announcing other news in the coming days.

Tastebuds         

• We’re now at over 35,000 users, with an exciting app launching shortly (we can’t tell you about it quite yet!). Plus we recently heard of the first marriage through Tastebuds!

Application deadline for Springboard London is 29th January. Apply here

If you are an Amazon Prime member, it is free here.

“I’m stunned that Apple would approve my ridiculous software. My product now joins an exclusive brotherhood of 600,000+ apps. I pull out my iPhone, click on the app store, and search. There it is! The icon, which I originally dismissed as amateurish, looks remarkably professional surrounded by Apple’s sleek store and a $2.99 price tag. So much to do! Ok, let me pull up the marketing strategy I wrote a few weeks ago.

1) Get in Apple Store.

2) Tell your Facebook friends.

Hmm. I thought I wrote a more robust plan than that.”

If you are not an Amazon Prime member, you can download the story from Mike’s site for free too.

“A $20 million valuation. A week ago, I couldn’t imagine an interested investor, but after the past few days, their valuation seems low. I’ve generated over $255,000 in less than a week. Yes, sales are likely concentrated from the viral boost, so extrapolating the last few days of sales is misleading, but I do have proven user interest in this
 product. I also have other investors knocking on my door. Should I wait for another
 offer? Oh, here comes the cheesecake.

“Deal.”

An excited laugh fills the table, and we all shake hands. Duggan orders a round of
 Champagne for us. It feels good to be part of a team.”

Of course, we are nowhere near a market bubble at the moment so the story has no relevance today. Bet you can’t guess how it turns out?

If you want to share something you feel passionate about and think it might also be of interest to the 50,000+ monthly readers of our blog, get in touch…

I don’t work at a web startup, we don’t make products and we’re not the usual kind of company you’d find at an event like BLN’s Lean Startup evening with Eric Ries last Monday.

To justify my ‘presence’ here, let’s start with some background – I work at 21apps (www.21apps.com) we are a small UK based consulting organisation with one aim and that is to ‘inspire people to change the way they work’. We do this through consulting, training, mentoring and workshops and although our current focus is largely around working with our clients to implement Microsoft SharePoint effectively to support organisational goals (not just dump the technology in), we also work with non-technology clients and our aspirations are to ‘inspire everyone to change the way they work’.

Part of the awesomeness of 21apps is our ongoing strive for new (and sometimes not so new) tools and techniques from both technology and non-technology worlds that can help us inspire our clients to deliver their technology projects and support organisational change, these have included:

• Business Model Innovation
• Agile and Lean techniques
• Learning Organisation
• Adaptive Leadership
• Hybrid Organisations
• Serious Games:
  • Innovation Games®
  • Gamestorming
  • Visualisation techniques:
    • Graphic Recording
    • Visual Meetings
    • Visual Facilitation
    • Doodling
    • And of course the techniques described in The Lean Startup!

The Lean Startup both as a book and a set of concepts, tools and techniques really resonated with us at 21apps; we use the techniques internally to manage and evolve our organisation, we apply it to SharePoint projects and we even included ‘Innovation Accounting’ as a key theme in our recent eBook ‘Measuring the Intangible, SharePoint Social ROI’.

Based on this, myself (@Soulsailor) and Founder and CEO of 21apps Andrew Woodward (@AndrewWoody), excitedly signed-up for the Lean Startup event with Eric Ries (@EricRies) that BLN organised last week.

We were definitely ‘the odd couple’ at the event! Most if not all the other attendees were in the ‘building of products’ game, whereas our focus is very much on technology consulting, facilitation and inspiring people to change the way they work. But why should Lean Startup only be of value to internet startups? Our view was that it isn’t, so we were going to be there and be proud to be different!

Attendance was fantastic, and we spoke, albeit briefly to a handful of extremely interesting and innovative people which was great; we also used the time to try out (first time ever live) using Visual Notetaking (sketchnotes) to record our individual perspectives of the event and you can see them later in the post.

Eric's view of the world

After an entertaining introduction from Mark Littlewood [This is why I let your advert stay in!], Eric got straight into a great presentation on the background and concepts of The Lean Startup, filled with some great anecdotes and insights into how this applies to start-up organisations.

Following the ‘formal talk’ the event went into an absolutely fascinating Q&A mode. At times it seemed like Eric was seamlessly flipping from psychiatrist to marriage councillor to start-up mentor and back again! The questions asked by the attendees on stage were really interesting and Eric had an uncanny knack of listening really well, seeing through the words, visualising the scenario and articulating clear actionable advice that I’m sure everyone in the audience got value from.

One great piece of advice from Eric to an entrepreneur on stage was (paraphrased):

“…It’s a bit late to go ship your product tonight, but hey really what’s stopping you shipping it in the morning..?”

The silence from the attendee was very, very telling. The looks on the faces of many of the other attendees gave away that a lot of us could be shipping sooner, shipping now! The explanation as to why that Eric gave was simple… FEAR!

Our one regret was that we didn’t get a chance (actually we just didn’t have the ‘kahunas’ until it was too late) to get up on stage and ask Eric:

“…How do you see the lean Start-up principles applying to a start-up consulting organisation..?”

Maybe next time, or maybe he’ll read this and get back to us – we shall see.

Sketch Notes Eric Ries. Sketchnotes by Andrew Woodward (@AndrewWoody).

It was great to meet a huge number of likeminded individuals, it was great to hear and chat very briefly with Eric himself, but what did we learn (validated or not!) from the event:

• I learnt:
  • Live sketchnotes really does work as a technique, but it’s very challenging to do
  • Although in our ‘space’ we are very innovative, we need to innovate more, ship more rapidly and test the market with ‘minimum viable products’ (MVP)
  • The Lean Startup principles definitely apply to what we do at 21apps
  • You should always test what you are doing against ‘should you’ not ‘could you’
  • The Lean Startup principles are more about management than you think they are
  • (Eric likes a pint of Fuller’s London Pride)
  • Andrew learnt:
    • It’s an exciting time with the amount of UK innovation and exciting new start-ups
    • Lean Startup and entrepreneurial ideals are becoming an integral part of big business – This is where we see 21apps adding value, helping and facilitating
    • We didn’t see many non-web/product startup companies – There must be more like us, isn’t there?

Sketch Notes Eric Ries, Sketchnotes by Ant Clay (@Soulsailor)

So that’s the ‘odd couples’ view on what was a really awesome event (thanks BLN and thanks for the opportunity to do this guest blog post!) and don’t forget ‘kids’, lots of what we at 21apps do is of relevance to start-ups now and one day when you become ‘Big Corp’ you may even use SharePoint, feel free to get in touch anytime!

- -

Thanks for the write up. I really like the sketch notes. Excellent way of remembering things.

Our next public event is MiM2012, a one day forum for corporate buyers and entrepreneurial sellers of mobile technologies. March 22nd 2012. Early Bird tickets available until January 31st. More info…

Our next public event is MiM2012, a one day forum for corporate buyers and entrepreneurial sellers of mobile technologies. March 22nd 2012. Early Bird tickets available until January 31st. More info…

Nice write up and pictures from the Springboard crew. Don’t forget, deadline for entering Springboard London programme is 29th January.

Ben Rooney writing in The Wall Street Journal: The Nearly Cult of the Lean Startup.

Interview with Eric Ries by Andrea Catherwood on Bloomberg TV.

Write up from The Next Women. ‘Lean Startup creator Eric Ries packs the house at London event.’

“I’d never heard of Eric Ries either. Andrew Griffin blog and review of talk.

Audio interview with Mike Butcher, TechCrunch.

Anyone read Dutch? KEEP IT LEAN – LUISTEREN NAAR ERIC RIES IN LONDEN

The Future is Now – Eric Ries in Cambridge in Cabume.

Write up from attendee Stuart Hall.

Drop us a line with your write up if you did one and we will add it here.

Massive thanks to – DFJ Esprit, TechCity, Brown Rudnick, Fidelity Growth Partners, Microsoft BizSpark, Red Gate and Springboard - for making such an excellent evening possible.

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=BLNLean

Our next public event is MiM2012, a one day forum for corporate buyers and entrepreneurial sellers of mobile technologies. March 22nd 2012. Early Bird tickets available until February 6th. More info…

Lessons from the High Street over the past weeks show that mobile is where retail is heading and that the early adopters of this channel are emerging as winners. Dozens of brick-and-mortar retailers are going bankrupt whilst the value of mobile transactions in retail is expected to more than double to $200bn globally in 2012 (Juniper Research).

Nick will be sharing his insights about where retail is winning in mobile and where retailers can learn from other industries at our forthcoming MiM Forum 2012 (22nd March, London). If you are in retail and want to know how mobile can make your business money then you need to be at the MiM Forum. Listen to stories of success and more interestingly – failure, join in discussions around real, actionable opportunities in mobile and network with people who are experts by dint of being ‘doers’, not ‘talkers’.

We record and share the talks, but the real value of MiM Forum comes from the people you meet on the day. MiM 2012 is a gathering of the buyers and suppliers of mobile technology that are changing the way business is done.

A limited number of Early Bird tickets are still available – you can buy them here. You will need to be quick though – we completely sold out last year. As with all BLN events, if you attend and don’t feel that you got value, we will refund the full price of your ticket.

Hope to see you there.

Special thanks to Betsy Weber for the good ones.

Massive thanks to our supporters - DFJ Esprit, TechCity, Brown Rudnick, Fidelity Growth Partners, Microsoft BizSpark, Red Gate and Springboard - for making such an excellent evening possible.

If you want to keep up to date about BLN events: