Philips Livable Cities - Latest to Reward Great Ideas

If you think of corporate America as cold, hard, and uncaring, you’re not alone. But several big companies have stepped up recently to prove they too have heart and want to help make our world a better place to live in.

The latest company with such a goal is Philips. Known for their electronics manufacturing of everything from MRI machines to big screen TVs, Philips has recently announced The Philips Livable Cities Award. This global initiative is designed to encourage and promote practical, achievable ideas for furthering the health and well-being of those living in cities throughout the world. As urbanization continues to spread throughout the world, and cities become more populated, common problems arise. Social, economic, and environmental challenges are growing rapidly and will continue to plague urban centers as populations become denser.

Philips recognizes that these issues require innovative solutions that will more than likely be presented by people within the entrepreneurial community. That’s why they’ve launched the Livable Cities initiative and are seeking input from those within that community.

So what do you get for solving the world’s problems? When you enter the Philips initiative in one of three categories (Healthy Lifestyle at Work & Home, Independent Living, or Well-being Outdoors), you have a chance to be awarded one of three grants, totaling $125,000, to help translate your idea into reality. Entries will be accepted through October of this year, reviewed by an international panel of experts, and awards will be announced in April of 2011.

So, do you have a simple idea that could improve the health and well-being of people living in cities? What are you waiting for? Watch the video to learn more, and then click this link to get started: www.because.philips.com

Success Myths You Can’t Afford to Believe

Why are some people wildly successful in business, while others just don’t seem to ever get anything going?  Sometimes the reasons are obvious.  Someone who’s lazy, unpleasant to be around, overly negative, or just plain dumb, for instance, doesn’t have much chance of being a business success.  They might win the lottery or something like that, but they won’t be able to successfully build a sustainable business.  It’s not always as clear why someone is successful though, and many people who haven’t yet seen success resort to believing and repeating common myths to explain it.

The danger in buying into these myths is that they rob power from those who believe them.  If you believe people are only successful if luck is on their side, for example, you’re saying success is out of your control.  So look over this list of myths and realities and endeavor to eliminate these beliefs from your mind.  Your business and your life will be better for it.

The Family History Myth: Some people are successful because they were born into a rich or entrepreneurial family.

Reality: As with most myths, there can be a piece of truth in this one.  If a person’s family has the resources to support their entrepreneurial dreams, or if they grew up learning about business, they can be said to have some degree of advantage.  Stories abound, however, of people who inherited the family business only to run it into the ground and end up broke.  There are also plenty of stories about people who were handed family fortunes and squandered them away.  The reality is that even though it can be helpful to have the advantage of a family history of success, a person with such a heritage still has to do what’s necessary to be successful with those advantages.  The reality is, even with an advantageous family history, you still have to work for your success.

The R.P.R.T. Myth: Successful people make it because they’re in the right place at the right time.

Reality: It does help to be in the right place at the right time.  Many successful entrepreneurs attribute their success to this.  But that’s not the whole story.  First, any successful entrepreneur who was in the right place at the right time, had to be the right person in the right place, at the right time.  In other words, just being clued in on a trend, discovering an innovation, or getting a hot tip isn’t enough.  In fact there are opportunities coming at us - all of us - all the time.  We’ve all been in the right place at the right time at some point, and we will be again and again.  It’s those who recognize those opportunities and act upon them who reap the rewards.  Have you ever had a brilliant idea that you didn’t act on and then saw the same idea come to fruition for someone else years later?  You were in the right place at the right time for the idea to come to you, and so was the person who made it happen.  The reality is that “R.P.R.T.” can’t make it happen.  Taking the opportunity given to you in the right place at the right time and making it successful takes work, dedication and focus, not luck.

The Who You Know Myth: People are only successful if they’re lucky enough to know the right people.

Reality: Many stories of success can be attributed to the saying, “It’s not what you know but who you know.”  In fact no true success story happens with someone doing it all on their own with no support from anyone else.  Knowing the “right” people can indeed contribute to your success in many ways.  What this myth fails to take into consideration is how successful people go about getting to know the right people.  Successful entrepreneurs are networkers.  They attend conferences, workshops, business fairs, and anything else they can find where they’ll have the chance to mix and mingle with like-minded business people.  It isn’t luck that they know the right people, it’s their dedication to learn and grow through those relationships that has led them to the right people.  Is it lucky that they happened to be at a conference with the one person who could help them take their business to new heights?  Maybe you could say that, but they had to meet that person, talk to them, and do whatever it took to get them involved.  No luck involved there.

The Timing Myth: Many successful people just so happen to launch their businesses at just the right time.

Reality: “The right time” is when there’s a need, and the most successful companies become successful because there is a need for their product or service.  That’s kind of a no-brainer, isn’t it?  But this rarely has to do with chance.  Entrepreneurs watch trends.  They stay tuned into the market and the needs of their customers and consumers in general.  Most importantly, they take that information and act on it.  Successful people don’t let fear stand in the way of their dreams.  They take risks, and often those risks pay off.  This myth doesn’t take into account that most entrepreneurs have started several businesses during their entrepreneurial life.  Some might have been successful, and many might have failed.  The key is that they keep going.  They keep trying until they make it happen.

The Background Myth: People who build successful businesses have the right education, training, work experience, friends, family, and mentors.

Reality: This myth combines several of the other myths and says that the only way to be successful is to be “lucky” enough to have outside factors working in your favor.  The reality is that, almost without exception, successful entrepreneurs have realized their accomplishments because of what’s inside themselves, not because of their circumstances.  Indeed, many have realized success in spite of their circumstances.  We hear often about high achieving people with no formal training, little to no formal education, and very few if any advantages over “average” people.  The truth is, success comes not so much from where you’ve been as from where you know in your heart you’re headed.

Successful people define luck as when preparedness meets opportunity.  Have you ever heard the saying, “It’s not what happens to you but what you do with what happens to you that matters”?  Maybe we can consider the “what happens to you” part as luck.  Often we have little control over what happens, so maybe that’s called luck - good or bad.  But when it comes to success, the luck piece of the equation won’t take you far.  It’s what you do with your luck that determines your success.  So if you’re counting on luck to make you a successful entrepreneur, good luck with that!

Avoid Becoming a Statistic - 5 Startup Hazards to Avoid

Statistics about startup failures are widely known by entrepreneurs as well as those thinking about starting their own businesses.  The SBA says that only 44% of new business startups can expect to still be doing business just four years after inception.  Even if businesses that were closed by choice, or due to retirement, the owner moving on to something else, or another planned exit strategy are ignored, and if we ignore non-traditional “business opportunity” type businesses, where commitment levels are infamously low, the statistic is still discouraging.  To those not sturdy of heart, numbers like these could be more than enough reason to want to throw in the towel before even beginning down the entrepreneurial path.  But don’t give up just yet.  While there are certainly no guarantees of success, planning for likely difficulties can considerably lessen your chances of becoming part of the bleak stats.

5 Common Startup Hazards

Be aware of these ten common pitfalls and keys to overcome them:

1. Family Ties. Starting a business is going to affect your family.  Whether you’re shifting around the family finances to cover startup costs, taking time away from home to tend the store, or converting an extra bedroom into your office, your family will likely need to make some adjustments to accommodate your new venture.  Success key: Get them involved.  Even if your new business isn’t the type where the kids can help in daily operations, just keeping everyone in the loop will go a long way toward mutual support.  From the beginning, let your family know what you’re doing and what sacrifices you’ll be asking of them.  Listen to their concerns, and even their advice.  Remember, they aren’t likely to be as excited about your new venture as you are, so they might just add some needed impartiality.  Talk about the changes you’re making, and avoid family matters deflating your ambitions.

2. Isolation. By nature, entrepreneurs tend to be independent people.  We love the idea of being “self-made.”  Be careful not to isolate yourself though.  Particularly in the beginning stages of business, we can easily get caught up in all that needs to be done and forget the importance of staying connected.  Success Key: Network, network, network.  The old saying is true: what you know isn’t as important as who you know.  Don’t try to go it alone.  In between your other activities, make time to network within your community of business people.  You’ll find valuable contacts to help you with everything from advice on your marketing and website, to the best ways to find suppliers and clients.  And once your business is going strong, don’t give up networking.  You’ll benefit from learning new marketing strategies, staying current on business trends, and building lasting relationships that can be priceless as you grow.  To find local groups that meet regularly, check out Meetup.com.

3. Overload. Any entrepreneur has a lot on his/her plate no matter what.  But one thing that will take the wind out of your sails and kill your startup before it ever really gets off the ground is becoming overwhelmed with all you have to do and not having a plan to deal with it.  Even if you’ve gone through all the proper planning and you’ve thought your business through backwards and forwards, it’s unlikely you thought of everything.  So although it looks like you can handle everything on paper as a one-person show, it doesn’t take many unexpected fires before you can start to feel like you’re in over your head.  Success Key: Delegate the stuff you hate. For all of us there are tasks we’d rather give to someone else.  They’re the ones that are boring, tedious, or take you longer than anything else, because they just aren’t what motivates you.  Another way to look at it is to identify those tasks that are not directly contributing to building your business.  For example, accounting is absolutely necessary, but if accounting isn’t your business, someone else should be doing it.  If employees aren’t in the cards, consider a virtual assistant for those tasks that are distracting you from your core responsibilities.  Whatever you do, don’t let overload kill your business.

4. Productivity Drainers. It’s 2 o’clock on a warm, sunny day, and your friend calls you up to invite you to have a couple of beers on the patio at your favorite restaurant.  You remember point number 2 above, and think, “Well, I don’t want to isolate myself, and hey, I’m my own boss, so why not!”  Hold on a minute.  There will be a time, if you do what it takes to make your business successful, when you can take it easy and goof off for the afternoon.  While you’re in startup mode is not that time.  Success Key: Create and stick to a schedule.  Especially when you’re first starting out in a new venture, making the best use of your time is critical.  Don’t let diversions pull you away from what’s important to you.  Also, you’ll want to be sure to organize your work area, use prioritized to-do lists, and implement a scheduling system to keep track of appointments and contacts.  Even if it’s just Outlook or the calendar in your Blackberry, putting your to-dos and appointments in something other than your head frees your mind to focus on your business and keeping headed in the right direction.

5. Money Issues. Just as starting a business is going to affect your family; it’s also going to affect your finances.  Hopefully, it’s a positive effect, but not usually for a while.  If you’re expecting to make a killing right off the bat, you have to know that’s not typical.  That’s not to say it can’t happen, but it would be foolish to count on it.  And nothing will kill your business and your enthusiasm for it faster than the worry and strife that comes with running out of money.  Success Key: Expect the best, and prepare for the worst.  Speaking of statistics… The number one reason startups fail is lack of capitalization.  The key is to balance your optimism about the success of your business with the reality that there are likely to be ups and downs.  Even in best case scenarios, business is cyclical, so simply plan for those cycles.  Make sure that you have enough reserve to get you through the lean times, and don’t spend like a drunken sailor during the good times.  Plan ahead, save, and spend wisely, and you’ll get to party like it’s 1999 soon enough!

Share your startup story, in the comments below.  What are or were your biggest obstacles?   What have you done to get past them and avoid the statisticians?

Building a Brand? Join the Crowd!

Most start-ups and entrepreneurs will by now have heard of “Crowdsourcing.” It is the Web 2.0 phenomenon that sounds almost too good to be true. It’s a simple way to find hundreds, even thousands of contractors who are on hand, ready and willing to work for your company. Crowdsourcing typically involves outsourcing a range of small task to a large, undefined group of anonymous workers.

Both new and established businesses have been taking advantage of having an entire crowd of employees at their disposal, for a fraction of the cost of hiring just a few. Crowdsourcing provides a pool of workers who are willing to help companies with, for example, their marketing, social networking and branding.

Why Everyone is Crowdsourcing

Start-ups and established businesses alike are using crowdsourcing as a quick and effective way to establish their company’s brand, and companies are really starting to see the value in treating potential customers as contractors and vice-versa. Crowdsourcing allows companies to let customers design and shape the brand which the company will become. In a sort of “casting call” move, companies can open their doors and put their contracts out for anyone to claim and complete.  The advantage of this is that companies find and hook their customers right from the start, by letting them have creative input from the get go. In this regard, Crowdsourcing is a true product of Web 2.0.

Benefit from a Pool of Creativity

There’s good reason small businesses are choosing to crowdsource their projects, rather than simply outsourcing them or submitting them to a bidding site. With traditional outsourcing services, ultimately, there will only be one person doing the work. That means only one set of ideas, one mind, one source of creativity. There are numerous sites such as Amazon Mturk, Cloudcrowd, crowdSPRING and 99Designs, all of which allow companies to submit various types of projects. The companies then get to choose between a range of finished products, not simply a variety of bids.

One of the biggest advantages to using crowdsourcing is that companies benefit from the work and creativity of many for the price of one. Even if, ultimately, only one project or design is chosen.  Sites such as 99designs and crowdSPRING allow start-ups and entrepreneurs to post design projects for members to complete on.  Once the competition time is up, the buyer gets to choose the logo or design he or she likes best. This kind of competition means that there are always plenty of quality designs to choose from, so crowdsourcing is a great way for buyers to take advantage of an entire pool of creativity, inspired by competition.

Try it Before You Buy it.

Before purchasing anything of value, you always like to sample it before you turn over your hard earned cash, right? So why would something as important as your company’s brand be any different?

With crowdsourcing, you can decide on exactly what you want done, and then harness the creativity of an entire crowd to get it done right. You can name exactly what you want and how you want it done, and then sit back while a bunch of eager people get to work on it. Rather than having to choose and commit to one designer, you can cut straight to the chase and choose from the actual designs.

Most Importantly

A lot of entrepreneurs and start ups are operating on a tight budget. Crowdsourcing offers an economic solution to getting a brand out there quickly and effectively. It is a fantastic way to get a business on the map, by quickly contracting out work such as logos, banners and article writing. It is also a great way to find an entire pool of talented people willing to perform tasks for your company, and it gives designers a chance to complete in a global creative environment and to get their work recognized.

So if you’re looking for a little help with your branding, consider crowdsourcing as a resource to get it done right - for less.  Have you used crowdsourcing for branding or another part of your business? Tell us about it in the comments!

Coming Soon to a Device Near You: Web 3.0

Hold on… aren’t we still figuring out what Web 2.0 is?  Well, yes.  But those on the cutting edge have been dreaming of Web 3.0 for quite some time already.  In fact, the oldest reference we can find to Web 3.0 was when Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, was asked about it at a conference back on August 2, 2007.  In any case, whether we’re ready or not, Web 3.0 is on its way, so let’s start the conversation about what it’s all about.

But before we start talking about Web 3.0…

It makes sense to get clear on what Web 2.0 is all about.  When the Internet first took off (we can call it Web 1.0, although it was never referred to as such back then), it wasn’t really interactive at all.  It was basically like a library of information.  You could look for what you wanted, read the results, and that was about the end of it.  The most interactivity we found was the ability to purchase products and maybe email a company for more information (through a web form if the site was really high-speed!).

With the emergence of Web 2.0, the Internet has become very interactive, even to the point where site visitors create the web content.  The most prevalent sites on the net, like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter could not exist without members contributing content.  To a lesser degree, even smaller sites, from news feeds to personal blogs, give visitors a chance to weigh in on the content, through comments, ratings and forums.  Some of these sites, news feeds in particular, actually decide which content visitors see first, based on ratings by previous visitors.  In this way, while the content itself is generated by the site, how that content is delivered is decided upon by the masses.  Then there are the social bookmarking sites, like digg, Slashdot, StumbleUpon, Reddit, etc.  These also depend on reader submissions for their existence.  In general, Web 2.0 has made the web hyper-interactive.  In other words, it has allowed people worldwide to interact with sites and with each other whenever they want, wherever they want, in real time.  This has made the Internet more intuitive and vastly more useful.  Of course, there’s more to Web 2.0, including design elements and mobile connectivity, but that’s a brief overview.

So, what can we expect from Web 3.0?

Web 3.0 continues the evolution of the Internet.  Unlike a software application, we can’t put a “release date” on the next version of the web.  There won’t be a day when we say, yesterday Web 2.0 ended, and today Web 3.0 begins.  Instead, just like with all evolutionary processes, the transition to Web 3.0 will be gradual.  We’re already seeing some signs of this transition, but most experts predict we will be safe to say we are fully in Web 3.0 some time after late 2011 and before 2014.

What will this next version of the web look like?  No one knows for sure.  Technology and ingenuity is continually advancing, so it’s likely that it will include features we can’t even imagine right now.  We can however predict more generally what kinds of functionality we can expect.  The word most used by web experts to describe Web 3.0 is “intuitive.”  For example, let’s say the Academy Awards show is going to begin in a few hours.  You want to know what time to tune in, so you go to Google and begin to type your query: “what time do the a…” Google, in a failed attempt to be intuitive, provides these search suggestions:

Above are Google’s actual search suggestion results on the night of the 2010 Academy Awards. The American Music Awards, the first suggestion, airs more than three months before the Academy Awards.  On the night of the Academy Awards, the search suggestion function wouldn’t have to be all that intuitive to know that that is, if not your most likely search query, at least much more likely than the AMAs.  Instead, “what time do the academy awards start” is the last suggestion, even below “when do the arizona cardinals play…” well after football season has ended.

Will it be your best friend ever?

The prediction for Web 3.0 is that all of the searches and a lot more will improve immensely.  Not only will sites be more generally intuitive, they will be tuned into you and your personal preferences.  This is actually true with Google’s search suggestion function now, when you have your search history turned on, but it still has a long way to go.  According to Wired Magazine’s Kevin Kelly, Google and others will indeed go a long way in the new Web 3.0 environment.  Kelly and others envision a web that knows you better than anything or anyone, when it comes to what you like, what you don’t like, and what you want and don’t want.

For example, rather than searching five different travel sites to find the best deal on a vacation package, the evolved web will not only come up with the best deals, but will narrow the results down to, for instance, tropical locations that are kid-friendly.  Want to go to dinner and a movie?  You would just need to type the phrase “dinner and a movie tonight” to get a list of movies now playing and your favorite restaurants that are within five miles of the theater closest to you.  Web 3.0 will “learn” about you based on your online activity and will get smarter, the more you use the Internet.

The question remains, do we really want the web to “know” us that well?  Also, what about people who share computers?  The beauty of the web, whatever “version”, is that it naturally molds to the preferences of the majority, so these and other questions will work themselves out as the evolution continues.

As entrepreneurs, we know that the only constant is change.  So as uncomfortable as this new A.I.-like web may make some, we can say for sure it’s not a matter of if but when.  And the best thing we can do is spot the trends happening, adapt, and even lead when possible.  This will ensure that whatever the future brings, we’re ready to capitalize - for Web 3.0 and beyond.

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