Originally from Shanghai, our developer spent a lot of the day in front of a judge becoming a citizen!

It took him about 6 months of work and study, while he held a permanent green card. He is a highly experienced software engineer with an undergraduate computer science degree from a Chinese university and a Masters in computer science from an American university.

He didn’t have to become a citizen to continue working and succeeding here, but he chose to do so, despite the obstacles.

That’s pretty exciting in my book. I’ve started and run companies in other countries, so I say this from personal experience: America is a great place to live and work, continuing to attract the world’s brightest to our shores!

Now, how do we get more US college students to stick with STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering/Math) degrees and to pursue advanced STEM degrees?

From a recent GAO study:

“In  a  recent  international assessment of 15-year-old students, the U.S. ranked 28th in math literacy and 24th in science literacy.  Moreover, the U.S. ranks 20th  among all nations in the proportion of 24-year-olds who earn degrees in natural science or engineering.”

Those are rankings we need to improve. It is fantastic that we can import talent, like this employee, but we need more talent originating on our own shores!

Here is the announcement blog post on the GeoIntelis.com website.

Since then, we’ve announced a slew of new data packages for both oil and gas exploration and production users, and for solar and wind developers.

Dozens more data packages are in the pipeline and will be announced daily for several weeks to come.

This has been a long journey, but one about which I have been passionate – and my vision for this product has been unwavering.

I wanted to talk a little about this journey here, from a personal and entrepreneurial perspective.

The Vision

GeoIntelis, like any other innovative Web 2.0 service, only got launched by staying absolutely true to the original vision:

Creating a 100% web-based, low-cost, easy-to-use, software-as-a-service GIS replacement for the small to mid-sized business subscriber that includes pre-loaded data and built-in document management and business process forms.

In addition, it had to be compliant with open GIS standards, license-independent, and lightweight for web users in all kinds of circumstances, including mobile broadband laptop users.

We also needed a platform that was highly extensible so we could add new mobile, tablet, off-line and third-party integration options without re-writing the underlying code.

Finally, it had to be an all-in-one solution that took the time, expense and complexity of “basemap” data collection, transformation and maintenance out of the picture.

GeoIntelis has accomplished all of these things.

The Challenges

Getting this launched has required overcoming numerous technical, business and capital challenges, including at least one complete re-write of the platform.

Software developers and analysts have come and gone. The underlying development environment and competing technologies have continuously evolved.

Also, along the way, we had to fight to avoid distracting side excursions that would have de-railed development.

These included straying from our commitment to independent licensing, such that we would end up beholding to one of the major GIS vendors, forced to follow their technology lead wherever it went and pay exorbitant licensing fees for every server and possibly every user, crippling our low-cost promise as well as slashing our technical potential. This would have been a disaster.

We also had to ignore the naysayers who said what we were trying to accomplish for our clients was too ambitious, faced too much competition from the 800-pound gorillas in the industry, or was too early in the development of mapping technologies to be successful. At this point, we’ve proved these attacks wrong. We’re competing and delivering solutions just fine, thank you very much!

Another major challenge was adapting to a changing technology environment as we went. As I’ve blogged about before, we switched the interface from a JavaScript interface to a complete Rich-Internet-Application (RIA) interface based on Silverlight. For the non-technical reader, just know this: It meant re-writing more than 60% of the software.

But it was entirely the right thing to do. Now we have a product that provides one of the most compelling user experiences for interactive business mapping on the market, while opening up an enormous horizon of features and integrations that we could never have accomplished using the old platform.

We also are pioneering a data set packaging model that we believe, while still evolving, puts our product at the forefront of interactive business mapping and data management.

By turning the data into part of the service, we’ve broken one of the longest standing and most challenging barriers to GIS adoption. The difficulty and expense of getting the basic data loaded is no longer an excuse not to have a functioning GIS.

We consider this one of our major innovations, but it required making a lot of tough decisions about what gets included and logically how to include it, while still offering an economical and simple-to-use system.

The Future

There is still a lot of work to be done.

On the marketing front, we have much more information about the product to add to our website, as well as videos and screencasts to better explain how GeoIntelis works.

On the development front, we have a tremendous number of additional features, forms (“Business Objects”), and data sets to develop and launch.

We also plan to add more specialized data and business object packages – basically a GeoIntelis App Store where you can buy a package designed to help you do your particular job in your particular locale.

We’ll have a package for you, whether you’re a wind energy developer in California, a real estate developer in India, or an oil and gas prospector in the Gulf of Mexico.

We also plan off-line versions, for use on a laptop at the wellhead, for example, or driving the highways in Utah and Nevada, looking at leasing properties for solar farms or powerline right-of-way.

And we plan mobile versions that provide you with specialized small-screen user-interfaces for accomplishing specific mobile tasks inside your GeoIntelis account, like rounding up photos to document wind and hail damage that automatically show up on your private GeoIntelis map when you take them.

Some of the more advanced mobile functions are cool enough, innovative enough and exotic enough that I won’t disclose them here, but watch for announcements over the next several months.

Entrepreneurial Lessons Learned

So, what can the active entrepreneur following this blog take away about getting a big, B2B service like GeoIntelis launched?

Here is what I learned along the way:

1) Stick to your guns.

There are going to be a lot of technical and business challenges. Worse, there are going to be people and personality challenges to trip you up along the path. You’re going to have to overcome these fearlessly.

And that means in addition, of course, that there are also psychological challenges along the way. Doing something new and forging a new path always prompts some degree of fear, worry and doubt in the reflective person, even if they’re a self-assured veteran entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs ask themselves real, practical questions: Am I on the right path? Does the business make sense? Am I spending the money the right way? Are we going to reach our goal? Will the clients like it? Will they buy it? Will they buy it fast enough and in large enough numbers to make it successful? Have I picked the right tools, vendors and business partners? Can I trust them? Do I have the right people involved? Do they share the vision and the passion? Will it all work out? Will I get the community and industry support I need to make this work? Will our competitors get there first? Will they do something better, cheaper or flashier than we can do?

All of these questions will pummel your brain when you’re doing something hard, risking your own time and money, and trying to accomplish something big. That is the nature of entrepreneurship. Don’t worry. Embrace it now.

These questions are signs of a healthy and analytic critical thinking process. Let the doubts wash over you and then put them away. They are natural and important, but they cannot dominate you or your work. Address them as needed, one by one, confidently and fearlessly. Knock out those risks that you can and mitigate those you can’t.

Remember this: There is no one on the planet better suited to fulfilling your vision of success than you are.

No one is going to give you anything and a lot of people are going to try to bring you down, once they see that you’re doing something that might have a real impact. Get used to it.

No one is going to make your vision, your product and your company successful. Only you can do that, so get on with it. You only live once.

2) Don’t be afraid to make changes.

This is a hard one. Even as you stick to your vision, you have to be able and willing to change the details, sometimes turning around 180 degrees with no notice. And your people have to be able to follow along and get in line as you make the change.

Here is the reality: I guarantee you, the marketplace, the clientele, the tools and partners, and the employees, are going to change while you’re working. Conditions will change and challenge you. Just accept it.

As a result, the goal cannot be to “complete the plan.”

The goal must be to “win the race” shredding plans A, B, C, D and E as you go.

Your plans are going to end up in the dumpster, over and over. A lot of online and software startups have junked planning entirely and just focus on delivering rapid iterations until something sticks.

That is close to where I have ended up, in today’s winner-take-all, lightspeed, web-driven world. Results are prized far above plans. We keep doing until we get the result.

Whatever works for you, just stay focused on the goal and make no apology when you have to change the details.

Anyone who doesn’t get it, who thinks that the plan is more important than using your brain to make adjustments, isn’t the person you want making the decisions or even advising you. Find someone who gets it. Keep looking until you find them.

3) Be grateful.

Be fundamentally, profoundly, deeply grateful to the people around you who make your success possible. Be grateful to your partners, employees and investors. As they demonstrate great commitment and faith in your leadership and vision, be sure that you are showing them your deep gratitude.

This is especially true of your family, which may endure a lot in order for you to see your vision through to fulfillment.

Remember to show them your gratitude every day, and help to bolster their endurance and faith by letting them know that you appreciate their sacrifices, by giving them opportunities to be involved, and especially by sharing your vision with them on a regular basis, so they understand what you are trying to accomplish.

And don’t be afraid to be vulnerable to them, to their fears and criticisms, their doubts and concerns. They will have these.

Address their concerns when you can but also let them know that you can’t address every risk. Let them know that you understand that they’re taking a grand roller-coaster ride with you over which they have limited control. But also let them know that the only way any great, new thing gets built is by taking that ride.

Thank them for taking it together with you.

First, we’ve switched over to TweetDeck for our tweeting.

As speculated previously, HootSuite came up with a monetization scheme, and that scheme didn’t work for this casual tweeter.

So, we jumped over to TweetDeck, and couldn’t be happier.

The prior reason for staying with HootSuite was that it has a lighter footprint. It is 100% JavaScript & AJAX.

TweetDeck, on the other hand, is an Adobe AIR RIA app. OK, so the overhead isn’t so heavy that we really care. It works great.

We’ve put all of our Twitter accounts into it as well as some Facebook pages.

Next, we’ll experiment with specialized, filtered Twitter feeds to isolate – without unfollowing – a few of the automated/media feeds.

TweetDeck is free, so long as you don’t mind using Adobe AIR, which is an installed application framework (like Silverlight, etc.)

Second, we’ve been experimenting with CamStudio and Wink at one of the ventures I’m involved with.

One universal truth about tech startups: Always too much to do and not enough money!

So, these are two free screen video capture tools.

A little background: For authoring and editing software demonstrations, Camtasia is the king of the hill. I own multiple versions and have upgraded diligently, but it is about $300 and has more buttons than it should.

It can be quite daunting, especially when you start doing detailed timeline editing. Necessary for some projects, but not most.

When you’re recording 30 second to 2 minute software demo teasers, or you just don’t have the bucks in your garage startup to spring for Camtasia, use CamStudio.

(Besides, nobody wants to watch 15 minute software demos. If your software isn’t starting to solve some problem after about a minute on the screen, you probably need to give it some more thought.)

We really don’t need more than 6 buttons to get our job done. We’re recording the screen. We need to start and stop. Anything more than that is wasting brain cells at this stage of the game. We go for simple instead. And CamStudio is about as simple as it gets.

CamStudio is a freeware, open source “screencam” that records all or some portion of your screen and whatever audio you’d like to input. It has 6 buttons and it works flawlessly.

You can record the whole screen or a section, output to multiple formats (or use VLC to output to any conceivable format!), record audio or not, and add basic screen annotations.

For doing a quick demonstration, this is hard to beat.

For more elaborate demonstrations, we have been experimenting with Wink.

This is also open source and it is a bit different. Rather than recording a continuous video stream, Wink actually takes a series of snapshots, which it then strings into a video during production. It simulates your mouse movements.

In practical terms, this has several implications.

First, the final output file can be tiny compared to competing solutions.The difference in size is remarkable.

Second, you have sub-second control over what the end-user sees. You can delete individual images to speed up, slow down, or remove segments entirely.

When something lags in my demo, I can remove a bunch of images that just don’t change much, and suddenly my demonstration flies.

Did I put my mouse in the wrong place and hit the wrong button? No problem. Just take it all out. The final video is remarkably tolerant of my crude surgery. It hangs together well, since Wink simulates the mouse movements from screen to screen during production.

You can do this kind of editing in other products – certainly in Camtasia – but in my experience editing my own clumsy demonstrations, it is extremely easy, exacting and fast in the Wink model.

Wink also includes many annotation and audio editing options. They are extensive.

The resulting demonstration is not as smooth or polished as one from Camtasia might be, but for some situations, where making a fast impression and covering a lot of material quickly is important, Wink is a very interesting choice.

Finally, I should mention that Camtasia has a younger cousin, Jing. There is a freeware version. Unfortunately, when we tried this one out we found that it only wants to upload videos to social media sites or TechSmith’s proprietary screencast.com website. Fine, if that’s what you want to do, but useless for putting demonstrations onto our website. We uninstalled it.

VCOrganizer is a calendar, note, task and contact synchronization app for the Android phone platform to Microsoft Outlook.

You’d think there would be scores of decent options to accomplish this very basic, common task. You’d be wrong. There aren’t.

There is one major competitor at $40 (a good percentage of the price of the darned phone) and it has terrible reviews. I never bothered with it. I don’t need an app deleting all of my contacts in Outlook.

Of course, there are lots of ways to sync Outlook to Android through Google Apps. And many carriers, including mine, include a decent MS Exchange-to-Android sync app.

But that isn’t what I wanted to do. I simply wanted to sync my private, personal calendar, contacts, notes and tasks from Outlook to Android. And there wasn’t any good way to do it until VCOrganizer showed up.

It is $13, includes a free testing app you can run before you buy to ensure your environment will be happy syncing, and it works perfectly.

It runs on and requires a Wifi network. It puts your contacts into Android contacts, with good phone integration.

It runs its own calendar, notes and task environment, however, which does not integrate with anything else on the phone – which is fine with me.

Loving this product so far. At $13, it is hard to beat.

Finally, I’ve been making backups using the freeware drive imaging software DriveImage XML.

A little background: I usually don’t do traditional backups. Oftentimes, setting up a computer, finding and installing all the proprietary software, and reconfiguring everything, can take hours to days.

That represents a lot of value for a growing business – and a huge investment for a busy executive. And that doesn’t even touch on servers, which can cost thousands in man-hours to properly configure.

I don’t want to backup the data. I want to backup the computer. So I do drive imaging.

A drive image is a complete snapshot of your hard drive (usually logical partition C:) that includes every bit you would need to write that partition back to a new hard drive in the event of a catastrophic failure.

Dog ate your computer? No problem. Buy another hard drive and write your partition back to the new drive. Plug it in and turn it on. Computer restored.

DriveImage XML is extremely easy to use, free for private use, 100% reliable so far, and allows you to browse your backup image, as if it were a hard drive.

These are the killer features for me: Being able to test my backups on the fly and to restore individual files when necessary.

Being able to browse the backup like a folder is really the “make or break” feature for all drive imaging and backup software: If I can’t see it and restore it, instantly, I don’t believe the file is backed up.

I haven’t had time to blog recently, with the birth of our second child, but I’m just going to dive back in with an “Exploration of the Inevitable”

First up, automated sentiment trading.

Precipitated by the real-time fire hose of data that is now hitting our screens, cellphones, tablets and retinal implants, AI is back in vogue.

Of course, AI doesn’t look anything like we thought it would. It looks more like a warehouse that thinks for itself, solving a tiny domain problem incredibly effectively, and making money in the process.

Or – just maybe – a Jeopardy robot.

So, trying to control the fire hose, AI is back, but now it is being used to try to tell us how we feel, on average.

Prior iterations of purpose-driven automated “news analysis” for stock trading brought us simple aggregation, with some basic statistical analysis, like SkyGrid. Useful reviews here and here.

Now, there are plenty of people building trading platforms and portfolios based on a mix of news and social media monitoring, with sentiment analysis baked in. One of these is SenseNews.

No idea if they’re any good – the website could use some work – but they’ve certainly got a compelling case to make for a sentiment-bot arms race in the trading world…

Want to try it for yourself?

Personally, my favorite tool for doing heavy unstructured data mining and collection, and then semantic analysis, is Arachnode.Net.

This is basically a very sophisticated spidering technology. Open source, ASP.NET/SQL Server 2005/2008, with lots of great integrations.

And these tools are being used and integrated in some very interesting ways for “sentiment mining.”

Pump a deep web ArachNode crawl through OpenCalais, do some Bayesian inference, and voila!

Some form of Machine Intelligence then emerges.

I’ve got between 3 and 5 business ideas around this stuff – if you know me, I’ve always got business ideas – and I bet 1 outta 5 is even viable, given enough money and hard knocks on the head. Maybe one of them will eventually make it to this blog.

In the mean time, if you’ve got some sentiments or ideas of your own, drop us a line.

We’ve been very busy at R7 Solutions launching new services this quarter, including launching an all-inclusive GIS hosting service, re-vamping our ArcGIS consulting, launching our Open Source GIS consulting services and re-launching our GIS application development services. And we have several new products and services in the works to be launched before the end of the year.

Here at the TechVentureGeek blog, I look forward to sharing several new reviews of great tools for startups, ongoing discussion of the evolving venture capital environment, and a humorous feature on toxic executives you sometimes find attaching themselves to startups and what to do about them.

Stay tuned!

Most of the time, I’m in Oklahoma or Texas, where my companies are based. I grew up in Oklahoma City, born from a long line of Oklahomans, and care passionately about the future of this place and its people.

But Oklahoma has a serious problem.

The evidence is mounting and it is damning: Oklahoma needs a serious policy change in order to compete effectively in the 21st century economy.

I had lunch with David Holt, the chief of staff to the mayor of Oklahoma City, awhile ago. He is currently running for the state senate and asked me what could be done to improve the state.

I gave him one simple exhortation: Do not fail to develop Oklahoma’s human capital, or we will be left in the dust as the rest of the nation and the world stampedes past us, into the 21st century’s knowledge economy.

Holt is a smart guy, having worked in the White House prior to becoming the mayor’s chief of staff. He knew what I was saying and was sympathetic, but many state leaders are not.

I had lunch with another recent state legislator, who is currently running for Congress. He shall remain nameless here, for reasons you will soon discern.

Leaving aside some of the more socially regressive aspects of his campaign platform, he expressed a strong desire that the state spend even less on education than it currently does, since “I have to justify giving those dollars to kids who leave town for Dallas with their diplomas.”

That attitude is killing Oklahoma.

Supporting world-class education in Oklahoma will inevitably result in some students taking what they’ve learned back home or someplace else. That is to be expected and promoted, since there is no better way to build the schools’ and the state’s reputation than by exporting excellence…

(If exporting higher educational excellence is a “problem,” then please sign us up. Do you think CalTech or MIT worries about where their graduates go? They want them, and their influence, spread far and wide… I digress…)

But there is a larger problem with this particular candidate’s thesis that spending less money on education is somehow a winning proposition. It will actually be difficult for Oklahoma to spend less on education than it already does: The state is currently ranked 49th in education funding. (Report: Oklahoma 49th in education funding)

There is only one lower spot we can fill. I’m sure that if we give it one last push we can easily take the 50th spot, and fall to the absolute bottom.

–

The results of these attitudes, and the failure to invest in education, have a real and tangible impact.

Check out the bottom of this chart:

(Source: http://www.creativeclass.com/creative_class/_wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/CollegeDegreeDensity.png)

Other real world examples of our failing and uncompetitive education system:

• Oklahoma scores in bottom 10 in education grant competition
• Study: State fourth-graders read below peers’ level

–

Why does education matter, you might ask?

For subscribers to the “Chicago School” of economics and the Lucas-Uzawa model (and the enormous body of work surrounding them), the answer is simple: 

Competitive relevance and economic prosperity in the 20th and 21st century spring from the development of human capital.

The body of work supporting this fact is massive, but here is one of my favorite tidbits: The correlation of education to local and city prosperity is so high that you don’t have to be the one receiving the education to benefit.

A 10% increase in the number of college graduates in an area has been shown to improve the income of everyone in the area by 9%, even if they weren’t the ones who got educated!

Moreover, historic school enrollment and educational achievement are highly predictive of future income levels for an area, even when controlling for that area’s historic income levels.

Education doesn’t follow wealth. Wealth comes from education.

Looking beyond simple income, the development of human capital is the most critical variable in improving the overall well-being of an area or city. In fact, it has the highest correlation (.68) to well-being when compared to unemployment, wage levels and per capita GDP:

(Incidentally, well-being and happiness are also strongly correlated with the presence of a larger “creative class” population and with a high technology economy. Source: http://www.creativeclass.com/creative_class/2010/02/19/what-makes-happy-cities-happy/)

And that means we need to prioritize education, even at the expense of other investments.

You can import your skilled and educated workforce, or you can grow it. But you can’t ignore it.

Without the human capital to develop the state’s economy and keep it strong and competitive, nothing else is going to matter, because there won’t be budget for anything else.

The time has come for Oklahoma to take education seriously.

If your representative, senator or other candidate doesn’t believe Oklahoma should be aggressively investing in education at the state and local level, ask them some serious questions:

• How is Oklahoma going to compete in the 21st century? What will be our strengths and where will we excel?
• How will Oklahoma attract, grow and keep the best talent without world-class education?
• How does Oklahoma intend to compete with Iowa, Kansas or Alabama in the 21st century knowledge economy – let alone compete with China and India?
• Where is our prosperity and economic security going to come from in the future?
• How will Oklahoma attract investment dollars from other states without a better-educated workforce and more research and development in emerging fields like information technology and biotechnology?
• Has what you’ve done so far – stripping dollars out of education and pushing us to the very bottom of the heap – worked? Has it led to success and competitiveness in the national and international labor and innovation markets? Is it time to try something different?
• Based on current investment and trends, do you have any evidence that Oklahoma will be competitive in the future knowledge economy? What is your “Plan B,” if not improving education?
• Do you expect all current economic trends to suddenly reverse, and the knowledge economy to evaporate?
• If you won’t spend money on education, what is your plan for the state’s economic future, and the future of our children and grandchildren? What leg will we stand on?
• If you won’t support investment in education, to bring Oklahoma back into serious competition with the rest of the US and the world, who do you really intend to represent and why?

That last question is tough, but the time has come for tough questions. If you don’t get satisfactory answers on the first 9 questions, you need to be asking the candidate, and yourself, the 10th question.

So today, Memorial Day, I wanted to mention this program again and provide some links for those who might know a disabled veteran who could benefit.

VEP 2010 Delegates (From the OSU VEP Program Website)

I was honored to be included through the Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO) as a mentor at a dinner for disabled veterans aspiring to become entrepreneurs by participating in the Oklahoma State University Veteran’s Entrepreneur Program (VEP).

VEP is a boot camp for disabled veterans that provides a full program to educate and jump start new businesses.

Here is a description of the program from a recent press release:

Veterans with Disabilities Entrepreneurship Program, known as VEP, is an entrepreneurial training program that provides the business support and resources necessary for disabled soldiers returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom or Operation Enduring Freedom. The program aims at developing viable approaches for turning veterans’ business ideas into workable business models, helping them create their own companies, and making their ventures sustainable.

My part was very small, but the veterans I met were extraordinary.

Starting a business is difficult for anybody. These guys, many of whom were already months to years into their ventures, were doing it while coping with recent, serious injuries and disabilities.

I met one young Navy veteran who successfully runs  his own photography business while missing a lot of both hands. His photos are great, but his attitude is extraordinary.

I met another veteran who had suffered a serious TBI, and now is starting his own nation-wide exotic and classic automobile brokerage. He has an uphill battle, but he obviously has the expertise, the contacts, and the passion to make it happen. And he was having fun doing it.

Another veteran, who had suffered a spinal injury, was an experienced entrepreneur who ran an information technology firm serving the US State Department. He had great stories to tell about flying into Eastern European embassies to secure and manage the local servers and infrastructure for critical diplomatic missions.

I certainly learned a lot more from these veterans about perseverance and bravery in the short time we had together than they could have learned from me about entrepreneurship!

The program is taking applications for 2011. Here is the program brochure. The program is free for qualifying veterans.

I can’t think of any better way to honor those who have sacrificed in service to our country, and to remember those who didn’t make it home, than to empower those who did return to become confident, independent, successful entrepreneurs. Their service enables the American Dream for all of us. They should have a chance to live a part of it.

If you know a veteran who could benefit, please be sure to provide them this link, and I’d be happy to put them in touch with the program’s directors.

We provide software engineering, business process design and strategic IT consulting.  Just like any professional services firm, that means keeping close track of projects, tasks and hours.

And we’re a highly technical company selling business automation to our clients, so we hate doing things on paper when a better option is available. And for project management and hours accounting, we’ve tried them all.

Oh, boy, have we tried them all:

• Paper
• Microsoft Project Server 2003
• QuickBooks Timer
• Paper again
• ScoutSoft StandardTime
• Axosoft OnTime

(We also looked at WorkEtc.com, DeskAway.com and BaseCamp.com.)

Finally, in 2009, we tried Intervals.

I have to give Intervals an unreserved endorsement. It does everything I need to run a professional services firm. It does it gracefully and works almost entirely as you’d expect it to work by looking at it. No training was required to use 90% of the features.

Intervals has the face of a project manager, the heart of a Web 2.0 AJAX app, but the soul of an accountant. And as a manager and owner, that’s why I love it.

Here are our favorite things about Intervals:

• It is 100% web-based and hosted Software-as-a-Service. This means we don’t have to install or maintain anything. We like this.
• It is sophisticated enough to allow us to develop complete multi-level project plans, and create time estimates and budgets. This is where a lot of online systems fall down.
• However, be warned, it doesn’t do Gantt charts and it doesn’t work like MS Project. If you want that, start from Project, but use Intervals to actually manage the project and hours.
• It is quite affordable for the SMB. Monthly subscription prices range from $20 to $175 per month, based on number of active projects. All features are available in all versions. As the lifeblood of our professional services firm, it is an absolute steal. I’m certain it has paid for itself many time over in re-captured hours, better project planning and tracking, and better and more consistent client communications.
• It provides direct upload of hours to QuickBooks, provided you set up the Projects in Intervals to directly match your Jobs in QuickBooks. We are still experimenting with these features and do some manual data entry into QuickBooks based on a summary from Intervals, but they do appear to work correctly.
• We use Intervals to track our billables and invoices. It does this job very well. Its “project dashboard” provides me with an instantaneous view into the current billable hours, invoiced and un-invoiced. Doing reconciliations, reviews, budget management, revisions and discounts used to take hours. Now, we can do almost anything required in minutes, and make it online and available to the business manager in the client at the time I make the change.
• Intervals provides a client portal. This is killer. For me, this immediately pushed me to test Intervals. Providing direct client access is the holy grail of project management, for us. It provides a whole new level of interactivity, collaboration and accountability for our projects, all of which we love. Clients can be assigned to projects as “Executives” and can review the project task assignments and status, hours and billings directly. They can review invoices. The only thing they can’t do is pay their invoices. Intervals isn’t an e-commerce system, although it could be in the future. In any case, we use Intuit’s services for those purposes, which keeps our accounting easy and accurate.
• Intervals provides great time sheet management. Time sheets are expected weekly and template-based e-mail reminders can be sent to consultants who are late. Time sheets are locked once submitted, which saves a lot of confusion. Time sheet management is easy and fast for managers. You can drill down into details to check on which projects and tasks absorbed the time, and manager approvals are one click. Just one caveat: Be very careful as a manager if you change hours after a time sheet has been approved. This can cause confusion in the invoicing process. It can all be fixed, but it does take a little research.
• Intervals wants to look and work a little like a social network. You can load a photo for each registered user and this photo shows up every time that user is referenced. Any time you create or change a task, project, comments, hours estimate, etc., the change is tracked in a post a the bottom of the item. This can be a bit much to look at for tasks that are in planning and receive a lot of changes, but it is at the bottom of the page and easily ignored most of the time.
• There is a limit to the amount of interface customization you can do: If you want to present your clients with a complete white label solution, this isn’t it. You can add a logo to the top and are given a URL at “https://companyname.intervalsonline.com.”
• You can allow clients to directly e-mail or fill out a form in Intervals to make a new task request. These show up in a general queue in Intervals and must be manually categorized and assigned. Intervals does not have a directly embeddable form for task requests, but maybe that will come later. In the mean time, it is easy to use a conventional e-mail form on your website to e-mail tasks to the queue.
• Ad hoc reporting could be strengthened, but you can customize most views to include the fields you need, and do a quick print out from the screen. Also, most data grid and other screens in Intervals allow you to quickly generate an Excel .xls, PDF or e-mail to share data, where appropriate.

Overall, I can’t recommend this SaaS highly enough.

I’ve been exhausted and frustrated by previous systems. Intervals never exhausts or frustrates me. It has quirks, like any system, and it requires organization and process, just like any project management or time accounting system, but it is certainly the best we’ve found.

(He’s got a gross photo to kick off his post. Be warned… !)

The thing to remember about the points that Mark Suster raises in this post are that they apply even to many initial valuation negotiations, or post-angel rounds.

If you don’t have a realistic outlook on the value of an early stage company – before a lot of the most difficult execution, monetization, marketing and sales have taken place – and don’t plan for later rounds at reasonable valuations, you may get stuck.

That can happen because of market changes, as this post discusses, or it can happen because you don’t have reasonable expectations to start off.

My advice? Get professional advice before pricing your offering. You and your company will benefit and your fund-raising efforts will be much more likely to succeed with a defensible valuation and reasonable terms, even if you do have to lower the share price.

Successes to Copy, Failures to Avoid – “Entrepreneur Panel – Moderated and structured panel discussion focused on the best and worst of the entrepreneurial experience and how they met each opportunity.”

I got a chance to talk about some of the best and worst hiring decisions I’ve made in my ventures over the years, as well as how intellectual property risks play into many of the businesses in which I’m involved.

The quick take-away from my answers? Hire slowly and fire fast.

Take serious care about whom you put onto the bus, and if you know someone isn’t performing or is poisoning the barrel, fire fast. It may be a cliche, but it best sums up how to avoid the worst mistakes I’ve made, and that most experienced entrepreneurs will admit having made.

Another entrepreneur mentioned one of my least favorite pitfalls: Client payment risk and defaults on large projects. Ouch. I’ve been through that one.

I also enjoyed talking with several audience members afterwards about their ventures and may have new portfolio companies soon to discuss as a result.

Put on by the Oklahoma Department of Commerce and organized by Shelli Todd, the conference was definitely entertaining this year, with social media educator and author Chris Brogan providing the keynote.

Hopefully the panel videos will become available soon from the Department of Commerce so I can share them with you here…