Friday, June 15, 2007

Find The Professionals And Get The Job Done

Elance is an online agency that matches technical, design and other professionals with businesses needing such services. Project “owners” post their requirements and service providers bid on them. The company was founded in 1999, currently receives 130,000 unique visitors per week, and matches 2,500 projects with service providers every week.


Elance launched in 1999 as an “eBay for outsourcing”, a marketplace where project sellers could shop for professionals to get the work done, and vice versa. The company raised $80M, $60M at the height of the bubble, only to see the market collapse. Worse, at the time “outsourcing” was viewed by many as distasteful and distributed workforces were not well understood. Due to all of these factors the online marketplace struggled.

One bright spot, however, was in large corporations. Although Elance was founded to bring outsourced, decentralized workforces to a range of businesses, it found that big companies were the segment of the market that had most embraced the concept. Many of these companies had engaged the services of numerous contractors, yet had no reliable systems to manage their distributed workforces.

In 2001, then, Elance both scaled down to conserve its cash and refocused on the opportunity to serve large corporations. It kept the online marketplace, but put its principal energy behind the development of an enterprise software package to permit big companies to manage and track contract workers. By 2005 the enterprise software product was used by 200,000 employees of companies such as American Express, BP, FedEx and GE, to procure manage over $10B of contract work.

In 2005 Elance perceived that the enterprise software industry had started to consolidate while the general public had come to understand and accept distributed workforces. Elance then re-evaluated its product line and decided to return to the original business idea by selling the enterprise suite to ClickCommerce for a reported $15M. Elance’s CEO Fabio Rosati described this product arc as a “long detour” on the road to deployment of the founders’ original vision.



Elance could have sold off or simply abandoned the marketplace product to simplify its operational workload. I asked Rosati why the company didn’t do this, and he told me that the company analyzed the situation and concluded that the marketplace, if properly managed, would not damage the enterprise product or divert undue resources from it (in cash or personnel). That being the case, there was no reason to abandon the possible long-term opportunity it represented.



The founders and investors originally envisioned the idea of a broad market to match many thousands of service sellers with buyers. The enterprise software “detour” secured the company’s survival during the dot com meltdown and culminated in the sale of the enterprise suite for $15M, a return of less than 20% of investors’ capital but more than adequate to fund future growth. If Elance’s only product line were enterprise software it would be deemed a less-than-successful exit for the company. Maintaining and returning to the original idea, however, gives the company another chance to fulfill the original vision.

Elance’s early vision caused it to launch before the market was ready. As noted earlier, I suspect that many companies have the same problem and need to adapt. Elance adapted by reviewing the market landscape and developing a product to satisfy the immediate revenue-generating opportunity. Many businesses may be able to develop a service offering that can bring steady cash flow sooner, and fund development of the original product.

At the same time, keeping the original product rather than changing the business model entirely gave the company a chance to evolve with the market. Elance’s strategy illustrates one way a company can be flexible and capitalize on available opportunities while preserving a range of options for the future.
More at:http://www.elance.com/

VLES

VLES is an online community that has created some interesting replicas of various locations from New York. Create an avatar to participate in the virtual world, and network with others.
Link-Mashable

On Becoming Entreprenuer

I always wonder and sometimes get amused when I see people who are exceptionally successful in their respective field.But,one thing is quite common among all of them or most of them,whether they are scientist,artist,film makers,politicians or entreprenuers.
They had always a different vision and they are quite apart in passion of their work,approach,excutation and most of them far ahead from their time.Since childhood I love ,admire and follow those people who have different vision or look towards life and work.I always wanted to be an artist or entreprenuer.On net ,I found million of people who had vision and drive but lack direction how to excute it.Only those people achieve who fiercely believe in what they think or say.As John Chow prove it,he love to say "the best entreprenuer idea is which have minimum input and maximum output".As far example ,John Chow himeslf who become millionaire and how much he had invested?Do you know?Just registered his domain name for $8.Making money with his different idea or vision.So the ultimate winner in the race of entreprenuership is,Vision or Idea is king,no matter,how weird it looks at first.When Sabir Bhatia of hotmail fame went for selling his "e-mail vision",many Vcs laughed at him Or king of all entreprenuership is Richard Branson who took world by storm with his all wierd ideas.I update everyday in my blog about new start ups but many of them just copy others idea.I"ll keep saying to those person who are keen to jump in any creative field or in pure entreprenuership.Vision or idea must be original ,its not important how much time you waste on investing on it.At last it bound to rock....

Geezeo is an online community and service that operates around helping you track your personal finances.

Geezeo is an online community and service that operates around helping you track your personal finances.

You can create accounts within Geezeo to connect to your checking and savings, student loans, car payments, brokerage payments, credit cards, and mortgage. Now Geezeo will keep track of all your transactions and balances for you, giving you an at-a-glance view of your debt as well as your balances in a consolidated manner. Geezeo can also send you account balances on your mobile phone via text messaging.

More than a tracking service, Geezeo is also a community, where groups can be formed for users to discuss planning and spending behavior, hints and tips. You have the option of sharing your personal information with other users to get advice and feedback. With this social structure integrated into Geezeo, adding a blog option for users wouldn’t hurt. Geezeo is currently a bit focused on students, but could easily extend its service to just about anyone else, offering tailored advice and planning and tracking tools for those looking to buy a home, new car, or start a family.
More at:https://www.geezeo.com/
Via-Mashable

Cuts.com

Cuts.com lets anyone edit and annotate online video. The site's CutMaker software lets members import an existing video and save only the clips of interest. Clip producers can add captions and sound effects before republishing the video to the Cuts.com website or across the Web using an embedded Flash player.
Its rivals are jumpcut and vSocial.
More at:http://cuts.com/blog/

Pipeline Deals

Pipeline Deals is a hosted CRM and sales tracking product. Small businesses can keep track of key contacts, open leads, outstanding payments, and upcoming tasks. A single user account is available at no cost. Paid accounts receive unlimited deal tracking, secure web access, and other premium features.Highrise and Streetsmarts are their competitors.
More at:http://downtownecommerce.com/

Become Millionaire Through "Artoprenuer"

After launching a successful natural-gas and electricity brokerage firm on Wall Street in the 1990s, Bruce Silverstein was making a seven-figure income by his mid-20s. But while he enjoyed building the business, the trading world left him miserable. "I couldn't convert any of the money into happiness," he says.

Though not yet financially secure enough to retire, Mr. Silverstein amassed enough of a cushion to take a risk with a business that tapped into his real passion in life: photography. He quit trading and, in April 2001, opened a small gallery in a 500-square-foot studio on the first floor of a townhouse on West 22nd Street in New York; today, Silverstein Photography is in a space 10 times that size a few blocks away, on the hottest block in the sizzling Chelsea art district, selling works from iconographic photographers like the late Hungarian-born André Kertész alongside edgy emerging artists.

Ditching the corporate life to pursue a personal passion is a dream for many executives and entrepreneurs, whether they make a windfall on Wall Street, take a golden parachute or sell their start-up. And if that passion can translate into more financial success, all the better. Of all the passions to cash in on, the art market seems a potent place to make a second fortune these days: A flood of new collectors and a weak U.S. dollar have driven prices to new highs. Photography prices, though not in the same stratosphere as paintings, are setting records, especially for the vintage prints in which Mr. Silverstein specializes. Some fine-art photographs that sold for a few thousand dollars in the 1980s can now fetch $1 million or more.

But as Mr. Silverstein and others who have jumped into the art business can attest, it takes deep pockets, patience and plenty of determination to break into the famously clubby art world -- and higher prices are translating into more competitive scrambles for salable works. Finding and nurturing new artists whose work can sell at prices high enough to justify mounting their shows is tough. And outside major cities, luring buyers is a challenge.

Just ask Ben Gall, who left a career heading smaller high-technology companies and, at age 54, started Holland Art House in 2002 in West Chester, Pa., a historic city 25 miles southwest of Philadelphia. Born in the Netherlands, he wanted to sell works of the contemporary Dutch artists he collected, including abstract landscape painter Luc Leestemaker. But it was a tough slog in a competitive market, where 12 galleries that started in recent years have been whittled to three.

Mr. Gall closed his gallery in 2005, and is now trying his luck with a venue called The Arts Scene, which he opened a few miles out of town. It includes lower-priced emerging artists, a frame shop, a café and musical events. Says Mr. Gall: "If you want to do something for artists and promote more progressive art outside big cities, don't ever expect to make money or do more than break even."

Laura Grenning, a former Wall Street analyst, has had better luck with the gallery she opened a decade ago at age 32 in Sag Harbor, N.Y., close to the fashionable Hamptons. She specializes in contemporary artists including Paul Rafferty, Walter Us and Nelson H. White, who paint in a classic style, with prices ranging from $1,000 to $45,000. She lost money the first three years, and has had good and bad years since. But she is now able to contemplate buying a larger building and diversifying into sculpture. "The last two years have been great," she says, allowing her to work on her own paintings, some of which she has sold.

Mr. Silverstein, who turns 40 Monday, had an early influence: His father, Larry Silver, was a commercial photographer whose award-winning artistic and documentary works appear in museums. Mr. Silverstein started collecting in 1993 when he began earning money from brokering natural-gas contracts, spending his spare time exploring the history of photography. His timing was perfect; vintage prints by famous photographers such as Walker Evans, who documented the Depression, and Harry Callahan's intimate portraits and streetscapes could be had for as little as $3,000.

He couldn't afford a big inventory at first, so he started his gallery with works on consignment from other dealers, including the lesser known early works of Aaron Siskind, a documentary photographer who made the transition to abstract expressionism. And he struck a deal to represent the estate of Mr. Kertész, whose still-lifes, portraits and street scenes of Budapest, Paris and New York from about 1915 until his death in 1985 are in leading museums. He was the sole employee, designing his Web site, doing framing, sending out invitations, hanging his own shows -- and mopping the floors. "I worked as hard as I could and immediately saw the benefits and mistakes," he says. "It was great." (He now has four other employees.)

Mr. Silverstein also made some astute purchases, paying $145,000 at auction for a work by eccentric Boston photographer F. Holland Day in which he depicts himself as the dying Christ in seven portraits. Though he was a bit nervous -- no one was bidding against him -- he got his validation when the Whitney Museum of American Art borrowed the series as the centerpiece of a show last March titled "Photography and the Self: the Legacy of F. Holland Day." Though Mr. Silverstein won't estimate what he thinks he could sell the picture for now, he smiles and says, "It could be worth considerably more."

Collectors who buy regularly from Mr. Silverstein say the business skills he honed on Wall Street have served him well.
More at:http://www.silversteinphotography.com/
Via_(http://uncommonbusiness.blogspot.com/)