Business

• 10 things we can learn from Apple
• 10 marketing tips learnt from Strippers - I saw this is on YC news and couldn’t resist!
• How to measure the success of your web app
• VC’s don’t have a clue how consumers behave
• Anatomy of a worthless business proposition
• From free to Freemium
• Links on Pitching Ideas

Technology

• Starting on Ruby on Rails: What I wish I knew
• Merging is the key to software development collaboration
• 80+ ajax solutions
• Search is a hard problem
• Technology behind Digg
• Why Content Management fails
• Asshole driven development

Just found this blog post by Mark Fletcher that nails what it means for a person to start a company.

As an employee climbing the corporate ladder at a company, it’s all about getting more. More responsibility, more control, a larger salary, a bigger title. However, the exact opposite is true when you start a company. A big part of starting and building a company is about giving up. A founder is in a weird position. When you first start a company, everything is yours. You own all the stock, you make all the decisions. This point of creation is the only time this will be the case, however. Forever after, the founder must give up more and more control to other people and more and more ownership to employees, investors, etc. The founder must do this for the company to be successful, but at the same time this is the opposite of what many people are used to doing.

I don’t look at it as giving up, I look at it as working together. Its better to have 20% of $100M than 70% of $1M.

To be successful, you got to build a team of people dedicated to achieving a common goal. By working together anything is possible. Look at Rod Drury, in developing Aftermail, he built a team of skilled people that came together and executed brilliantly. After the sale to Qwest, Rod rolled a lot of his team onto his next project - Xero and their kicking ass now.

Food for thought!

On Tuesday DeNada, Star Now and Karactaz are graduating from CHQ. (We missed the cut off this year, but we’ll be good for next year.)

It great to see such great companies flourishing. They will join companies including Optimal Usability, Virtual Katy, Spikefin, Calcium Communications, Innaworks and SilverStripe as Creative HQ alumni.

Here are some information about the companies.

Star Now

With over 500,000 members worldwide and clients including the BBC, MTV and high-profile reality TV stars, chief executive Cameron Mehlhopt says StarNow.com has no intention of slowing down.

“StarNow.com gives talented entertainers like actors and models the chance to manage their own careers, be their own agent and sell their talent to casting agents and directors around the world,” he says.

“The UK is our main market, however we are expanding our local profile and planning to officially launch StarNow.com into the USA and Australia in the coming year.”

Karataz

Karactaz was founded by Dylan Coburn in 2002 to sell creative services, especially animation products and technology.

The company has received multiple international awards for television commercials and advertising campaigns, and has a strong and growing export market.

“We’re fast becoming a major player in global animation – original property development, production services and proprietary technology,” says Mr Coburn.

“Now we’re developing our own in-house software product ‘Karactaz Eclipse’ to transfer the techniques created for short-form work into long-form forms like television.”

De Nada

DeNada is the first fashion company to graduate from a New Zealand incubator.

Co-run by Nada Matthews and Stewart Island-based Jo Learmonth, deNada launched a new concept in fashion and retail with the opening of their Featherston Street store.

The collection of street-styled and urban garments in sizes 8-16 is extended to include off-the-shelf garments in curvy and tall, catering for different body shapes.

Jewellery, accessories, good coffee and a boutique selection of low-fi and café style music are available to listen to and buy.

It’s going to be a great party. Last year seeds of Summer of Code were planted… Who know’s what will happen this year ?!?!

The team from innaworks have officially launched alcheMo, their J2ME to Brew porting solution. This tool will help streamline the mobile development process to support multiple phone platforms through their translator. This will help save companies save mega-bucks in development costs.

Kudos to Stephen and the team for another kick mobile development product!

Another enjoyable webstock mini event. Lots of fun had by all. Nice to see a good turn out by all of the Wellington web companies.

Leigh Blackall’s look at Second life via an education focus was interesting. Maybe we should work on Summer of Code 2.0 Second life island…. Hmmm something to think about

The Web 2.0 debate was really fun. Mike Brown’s speech and Phil’s heckling were a highlight. ProjectX is part of the Web 2.o conspiracy with our Rankr rating a mention.

Kudo’s to webstock team for running another great event!

We’d like to welcome Paul Gold, who has joined ProjectX as part-time CTO.

Paul has recently began consulting after finishing at Trade Me as their resident database and infrastructure guru. Paul also was a part of last year’s summer of code.

Paul, will post more about himself shortly.

Nahum sent through this link to a post on 100 free CSS resources.

The list includes a number of tools that will help you with your website optimisation.

Enjoy!