Blog Roundup – A good post on why stealth mode doesn’t work… If you have a tech startup, read this!

Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets

Decent VOIP phones for your startup

I haven’t posted anything about Tools We Use in awhile, so I thought I’d drop you a post about a recent upgrade.

Like many companies, basically all of the Black Mesa Ventures companies use VOIP phone systems. I think the last company using a local, on-site hardware PBX system sold it in December 2008 and moved everything to hosted VOIP. (See this previous post on this transition.)

And we love it. We have complete web-based management of our telephone lines and extensions, extension pools, forwarding anywhere we need it, as many local and national toll-free numbers as we want, and forwarding of voicemail and fax messages via e-mail to any device. There is also a lot of new competition emerging since we selected a vendor, including Google Voice and Grasshopper.

However, our initial choice of handset didn’t work out. We used BudgeTone phones at first, which were OK most of the time, but the sound quality was mediocre and once we moved them behind an additional firewall, they had difficulty logging into the service. (From what we could determine, the port forwarding confused them when there were multiple phones on the network.) They had to go.

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Software Equity Group releases 3Q09 Software Industry Equity Report

In addition to my previous post about software company valuations, EBITDA multiples and Martin Wolf Securities, I also like to read the Software Equity Group’s industry reports in order to align my thinking about rates of return, growth segments and future investment.

They’ve recently released their third quarter 2009 report:

http://www.softwareequity.com/Reports/3Q09_Software_Industry_Equity_Report.pdf

Overall, there is improvement, although things are far from “back to normal.” I’d encourage you to read the report and think about what your company is worth and where you should be investing now for growth.

I’ll leave you with one encouraging graphic from that report. This is a graph of total mergers and acquisitions dollars spent in the industry, according to SEG :