On Saturday, January 27, Jason and I will be speaking at Villanova University’s Beyond Ideas: The Art of Entrepreneurship. Here’s what we are speaking about:

Introduction

• Our Story
  Jason, Kim, and Stranger Studios
• Winelog
  Background on the idea and development and an overview of what WineLog is.

Types of E-commerce Businesses

• E-commerce as an extension of an existing business
  Best Buy: Buy online, pickup in store. Negative point: Best Buy has different online and in-store prices (confuses customer).
  Gap: Fully integrated with in-store shopping.
• Pure E-commerce
  Examples of purely e-commerce businesses (Amazon) and a discussion of the benefits and weaknesses of doing business online.
• Other hybrid models?
  Examples of web businesses that later moved in bricks and mortar businesses: EBay shops that sell your stuff for you.
• Netflix vs. Blockbuster
  How a bricks and mortar store can get a leg-up on a purely e-commerce company.

Starting up an E-commerce Business

• The Long-tail
  Why online businesses can take advantage of the long-tail in ways that traditional businesses cannot. (Hacking the Long Tail)
• Getting free help
  How to immerse yourself in the community you are hoping to break in-to and build up a support network. (BarCamp, Co-Working) 
• The role of planning in online ventures
  When do you need a plan and when is a plan a hindrance?
• Your online business is getting some attention, now what?
  Comments about the different paths you can take with your *potentially* successful online business. Taking VC money vs. boot-strapping, etc.

Making Money Online

• Brokering information on the web
  New web ventures base their revenue model on selling information, rather than what we traditionally think of as a product or a service. A discussion of blogs (Techcrunch, GigaOm) and other information-engines (Epinions, CNET).
• Growth Before Dollars
  Don’t think dollars first: web destinations that are useful to people will grow. So make your site, application, or service useful first. Once you’ve got a lot of people’s attention, then it should be easy to make money.
• Your idea doesn’t have moneymaking potential…so what?
  Don’t lose sight of the other benefits of your online venture – like learning new things, gaining a posse, credibility and popularity, enlarging your network and just HAVING FUN (Interactive 8-Ball, Mobilicio.us).

See CreativeCamp.org for more information. BarCampNYC2 was awesome, but the only reason we treked all the way up there was because Philadelphia-area entrepreneurs hadn’t yet gotten their act together. Well now Philly has an unconference of its own: CreativeCamp.

If you are going to be near (within 3000 miles) Philadelphia December 2nd, think about coming. It should be, well, awesome. I’m not sure yet what I’ll present on, but I’m thinking of doing something hands on. Maybe some microformats stuff. Who knows.

Spread the word.

Kim and I had a great time at BarCamp in New York this weekend. We met a ton of like-minded people doing incredible things.

Our presentation on “Hacking the Long Tail: Making Collaborative Filtering work for WineLog.net” went well. I was hoping to get educated by someone in the audience who knew more about the Long Tail than I did, but people were either busy making impromptu business plans in a competing session or more interested in WineLog iteself than the Long Tail.

The wine tasting part did go over well. There was a lot of wine left over, but that just made our evening more interesting. You can see which wines we tasted at BarCamp NYC2 at WineLog.

Presentation PPT: BarCamp_Presentation.ppt (blog post to follow)
Completed Wine Tasting Spreadsheet: BarCampNYC2_WineTasting.xls

The presentation and tasting was filmed, but I’m not sure if it is online yet. I’ll link to it when it shows up.

Here is a brief (and no way complete) list of interesting people we met this weekend:

• Chris from VistaPrint. Chris was a fun guy to hang out with. Kim and I are big fans of VistaPrint; their cheap inexpensive printing services help us save a ton of money for our clients. I was as excited to meet someone from VistaPrint as I would be to meet someone from the Chicago Bears. At the same time, Chris was excited to meet real users of the system he works on.
• Nate Abele from CakePHP. Nate is a PHP developer to look up to. If there were PHP developer trading cards, I would covet his rookie card. His project Cake is a framework for PHP. It’s similar to the popular “Rails” framework for the Ruby programming language but for PHP. Unlike some other PHP frameworks, Cake doesn’t just try to mimic Rails. Instead it is built with PHP developers in mind and works off the strengths and weaknesses of PHP. It’s really interesting stuff, and I’m excited about trying it out with a future projects. It would have been great for WineLog if I had looked into it more before I custom-coded a lot of what Cake offers.
• David Cohn. David writes for Wired.com. He’s writing an article about BarCampNYC2, which might feature Kim and I as crazy Philadelphians who made the trip up to New York to walk around in our socks and talk to geeks.
• Dean “the Australian” Collins. Dean does a lot of things (like us!), but just seems to love helping startups start up. He was always good for a good comment/question in any session he attended. You can find out more about Dean and his work at Cognation.net.
• Avi Welnsky. Avi writes for us over at InvestorGeeks. I had never met him in person though… cool guy. Among other things, he taught me a great way to get a high page ranking in MSN’s search engine.

I can’t relate how great the atmosphere was at BarCamp. I had that feeling like “these are my people”. There were a lot of attendees I wish I could have spent more time talking with. Contacts were made though, and I’m sure we’ll follow up. For others, we’ll just have to wait for the next BarCamp.

Information about BarCamp NYC 2 can be found at BarCamp.org.

I’ll be presenting on “hacking the long tail”, discussing how the long tail phenomenon applies to WineLog. We’ll dispute the assertion that wine tasting note sites are doomed to fail and give some reasons why a social community and recommendation engine can be successfully applied to the domain of wine.

Kim and I will also be performing a little wine tasting. “Volunteers” will drink 2 of the 4 red wines we’re bringing. Then we’ll run their ratings through a little spreadsheet application I’ve rigged. The spreadsheet will predict their rating on the other two wines they haven’t drunk yet. Then we’ll see how good those predictions are. The spreadsheet is pretty cool, doing similar analysis to what is done behind the scenes at WineLog. But it also gives me the idea to package something up for people to download and use at their own tastings. Hmmm…

I’ll post back here after the (un)conference and let y’all know how things went.

Stranger Studios is going full-time. To celebrate, Kim and I have refurbished the company website. We think the new design is, like, totally sweet.

And we’ve started a blog! (I can never get enough.)

The blog itself should get a makeover fairly soon. And we’re, as always, very busy with WineLog. However, we’re looking for more work to fill the time I will be freeing up when I leave my day job. If you are looking for a designer or web developer to deliver quality work, drop us a line. We won’t let you down.