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7 Myths of Starting Up – Busted here!

Myth 1 – I have a great idea but I can’t share it coz someone will steal it.

Oh man, if that were the case, then dreams would be the most expensive commodity on the planet.

Salvador Dali- the father of Surrealism slept on a couch with a spoon in his mouth. He would start dreaming up crazy ideas and as he would drift into his sleep, the spoon would slip out of his mouth, fall on the floor and wake him up. He would immediately get up, rush to his canvas to paint what he had just dreamt. The million $$ Dalis that exist today are paintings, not dreams.

Truth – An idea is worth nothing. Execute. Execute. Execute to make it valuable.

Myth 2 – When do I approach the investors? Hmmmm… What’s the best ‘timing’?

Huh?? Were you Sleep Walking?

If only investors were like the Black and Yellow Mumbai cabs that you can hail and get into any time you want!

No VC or Investor is waiting with bated breath biting her fingernails for you to call! It’s quite the opposite scene actually. In a booming Economy (like India), investors are deluged with lots of high quality and established business investment options, so you have to fight hard to get into the VC’s visitor’s area to begin with!

Truth – Capital Chases Entrepreneurs, not the other way around. Invest all your energies in building a GREAT business. Everyone will be ringing your doorbell.

Myth 3 – I have no money to start. (Sniff Sniff).

Most new business ideas today really need very little capital. If you are thinking of starting an Internet enabled business, the cloud takes away all the pain of investments. Domains cost less than 20 US$, and the rest of it is almost free. Sites like WordPress and their plugins can get you a fully loaded website up and running in a few thousand rupees spent.

Sure, if you have a more Capital Intensive business idea, then think really hard. Start Ups don’t survive on Love and Fresh Air. They need real hard cash. If you are on the Poverty Line, don’t attempt to start up. There will be better times to be more adventurous.

Truth – Be ready to sacrifice a good couple of years’ earnings into starting up and not looking like someone who lost all her baggage after a 24 hour flight. Once you have the cushion of 2 years’ savings, a lot more confidence will seep into your decision-making and improve your risk taking capabilities. Also Budget your Burn to say last for a year or whatever be your test horizon. That discipline will go a long way even after you get funded.

Myth 4 – Let me Grow First. Revenues can come Later.

Oops. That’s the spine breaker.

Unless you have a massive, massive overnight hit like a Twitter or Facebook, tread the ‘growth first, revenue last’ road with caution.

You may be suffering from a deep-seated insecurity to generate revenues and conveniently shoving that fear under the carpet by postponing revenue generation. It’s like hiding a body in the deep freezer and hoping that it will never be found.

Generating revenues is a real PAIN. And it’s best confronted in parallel to building your business. In fact, so many extra features of your service or enterprise may never be needed if you listen to the fat men with the cheques books early on. Also, as investors, partners, and potential acquirers  start noticing your business, they look your Generating Revenue Experience (GRE) scores. If you didn’t apply for the exam, you wont get in.

Truth – Get that begging bowl out. Try and test (if you want to maintain Facebook like early start up Virginity) what people will pay for – but make sure that you know where the light switches are when the darkness arrives.

Myth 5 – I’m a techie – I don’t know anything about business. I am a business guy, I don’t know anything about technology!

Then learn!!

The demons of the mind that say that you don’t know how ‘business’ works need to be exterminated on day zero of starting up. Look all around you – the greatest geeks in the world – Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, The Google Twins, Marc Z – all have understood the science of business better than anybody else.

Also, for a M.Com dud like myself, today, technology and self -serve platforms have become so easy to understand and implement, they are like those do it yourself Lego Puzzles. All you need is the patience to sit down and assemble the rocket you are trying to build step by step. Read the instructions carefully and you will be set.

Truth – No entrepreneur can be in-complete. This is actually also the first step in becoming an entrepreneur – understanding a domain that you otherwise had no clue of.

Note – I am not suggesting mastering all domains, but rather just understanding them.

Myth 6 – Professionals whom I want are too expensive to hire.

Did you ask them? Did you look into their eyes and explain your invention and what can happen with it?

So many of the ‘been there, done that’ types are so bored and stuck en-cashing salary cheques every month. They are waiting for folks like you to go up to them and redeem them! I meet so many professionals (earning much more than me) ever so often who say
‘Wow Alok, I wish I could be doing the exciting and innovative things you and your Company do’!

Truth – Professionals with big compensation packages may not quit their job in a hurry for your Love Songs, but they can certainly begin associating with you. Start meeting them and burrow into their experiences. Shed a few shares and get them on your board. You may even realize that you never needed them full time!

Myth 7 – I HAVE TO make this work. (Stomping of feet on the floor heard).

Once in a while, when you sample a new restaurant or cuisine, you do risk getting in there, and ordering a meal you have never tasted before. In the first few bites, you know if it is a ‘disastrous’, a ‘will do, let’s get this done with’ or a ‘wow’ meal.

In a start up land, while your dreams may have taken you to heaven in a first class seat, when you actually implement the idea and hit execution, you may land up in rubble, deep under the ground.

Do not deny the ‘badness’ of the idea or the common sensical fact that ‘this was a bet that should not have been played’. Enterprises are built on hypothesis. If even a couple of assumptions or facts (which are crucial to business) don’t turn out the way as per your expectations, ditch the business, kill all engines, sit back and revise the learnings earned.

Truth – Get out, as soon as you see smoke. Don’t put on a mask and enter the fire pretending to be a firefighter. You will not come out alive and your soul will be too charred to boot up again.

DIY Sound-Sensitive Camera Trigger Takes Photos at Just the Right Second

We've mentioned one way to take split-second photos, but if you have a few electronics skills under your belt, you can make a more advanced, Arduino-based version that responds to sound instead of pressure.

Instead of having to place your object on a pressure-sensitive plate, this model works on sound—so the action being photographed needs to produce some sort of noise—but it broadens the number of things you can shoot. It works in a similar way as our previously mentioned model, closing a circuit that sets off a camera flash when it detects a noise. It's a pretty neat photo experiment if you have the necessary tools, so check out the video above for a more detailed explanation (and a few cool demonstrations).

How-To: Arduino High Speed Photography Trigger [Make]

50 Free Apps We're Most Thankful For

As we prepare to give thanks for our delicious Thanksgiving meals (and impending food comas), let's not forget to pay tribute to the wonderful developers who bring us our favorite free apps.

Earlier this week we asked you to share the free apps you're most thankful for, and you came through with thousands of votes for apps covering the desktop, mobile phone, and devices in between. With a little spreadsheet magic and a few choices of our own, we bring you the top 50 free apps we're all most thankful for. Whether you're celebrating the holiday or not, it's a great list of free software that ought to make for some gluttonous downloading. The popular apps are some of the more obvious, however, so be sure to look further down the list for new free software you may not yet know about. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

The Top  10 Free Apps We're Most Thankful For:

Dropbox

VLC (Video LAN Client)

Google Chrome

Firefox

Opera

Google Apps

Simplenote and Notational Velocity

CCleaner

uTorrent

Transmission

For the entire list of top 50 applications check out this link at productivity blog Lifehacker:

Check out here

Top 10 Registry Tweaks that Power Up Windows

The Windows registry is a mysterious place, but if you're comfortable editing it, you have the power to tweak nearly every Windows setting you can imagine. Here are 10 of our favorite registry tweaks that make life easier.

All of these hacks work in Windows 7, even if not labeled as such. Many may work in Vista or earlier versions of Windows, but varies, so be sure to read up more on the tweak before you go meddling in Vista's registry. And, of course, be sure to make a backup of your registrybefore you start hacking away.

10. Hide Pre-Populated Items in Windows Explorer's Sidebar

Windows Explorer is pretty easy to navigate, but that sidebar can easily get cluttered with features you don't use. For example, if you're the only computer on your network, you probably have no need for the Homegroup or Network trees. Each item in the Explorer sidebar has a registry key, and with just afew minor tweaks, you can have them hidden in no time.

9. Disable Libraries in Windows 7

The new Libraries feature in Windows 7 is, in our opinion, one of its best underhyped features—but if you can't get over the annoyance of having multiple folders grouped together, you can get rid of them with a simple registry tweak. Note that, while you can hide them from the Explorer sidebar using #10, the feature itself is still around, and will likely pop up in other applications. So if you really don't like Libraries, this tweak wil get them out of your sight for good.

8. Change Your User Profile Location

Whether you've bought an SSD and need to move your home folder to another drive or you just don't like how long it takes to navigate to your documents, the registry has a few options for moving your user profile folder. It's not something you want to do if you've been using your computer for awhile (since many places will reference the profile's old location), and it isn't for the faint of heart—since it involves a good 21 steps—but in the end, it may very well make your life a lot easier.

7. Customize Windows Explorer's "Open With" Menu

The context menu is great for performing tasks quickly, but as you install more programs, that "Open With" menu can get incredibly unruly. To get rid of those "Open With" entries that never seem to serve any use, you canmanually edit which programs show up for which file extensions in the registry. It's a bit more time consuming than other registry tweaks, but it's far from difficult, and you're sure to be happy with the end result. If, on the other side of the coin, you want a program permanently docked in the "Open With" menu, you can add it yourself through the registry too.

6. Speed Up the Windows 7 Taskbar

The Taskbar is no doubt one of the best features in Windows 7, but it isn't without its tiny annoyances. The Taskbar popups (along with the associated Aero Peek functionality) require you to hover your mouse over the taskbar for a second before they appear—a delay that gets old quickly. If you'd like to speed up the thumbnail delay, all you need to do is tweak a simple key in the registry. You can also get rid of the Aero Peek delay, for super-fast window management. If the Taskbar thumbnails and Aero Peek aren't your style, you can use this registry hack to cycle through windows quickly with mouse clicks instead.

5. Disable Annoying Notification Balloons

The notification balloons in Windows' lower right-hand corner can be helpful, but if you have a number of things going on at once, they can get pretty annoying. It's an extreme measure, but if you'd like to turn them off altogether, all it takes is a very simple registry tweak. Of course, if you find that disabling them completely is too extreme, you can always turn them back on.

4. Change Your PC's Registered Owner

Whether you've acquired a used PC from someone else, or you just don't like the name you registered anymore, you can change the registered owner and registered organization of your PC with a quick registry tweak. It may seem useless to some, but when you inherit an office computer or end up changing where you work, it's a pain when your computer automatically adds incorrect information to everything.

3. Take Ownership of Any File From the Context Menu

If you don't have ownership permissions of a file or folder in Windows, it can be difficult to work with it—and taking ownership of a file is no easy task. Thankfully, with a small registry hack, you can add a "Take Ownership" option to the Windows Explorer context menu, making you the owner of the file in just two clicks. We briefly mentioned this tip before, but you can find the full hack over at our friend The How-To Geek.

2. Stop Windows Update from Hijacking Your PC

Windows' automatic update system is convenient for those of us that would rather not deal with manual updates day in and day out, but when it forces you to reboot your computer (or forces you to install updates when you put your computer to sleep), it can make you want to pull your hair out. Thanks to the registry, however, there are a few different registry tweaks that will keep Windows Update from getting up in your business: one to keep it from forcibly rebooting your computer, and one to keep it away from your shut down and sleep buttons.

1. Enable God Mode to Quickly Access Any Setting You Want

If there's one thing that bugs me about Windows 7, it's that the new Control Panel takes forever to navigate, with seemingly infinite levels of buttons and links to click through just to activate one setting. The Windows 7 "God Mode" hack (which is one of our five favorite Windows 7 tweakers) puts every setting in the Control Panel at your fingertips through a magical folder in Windows Explorer. You don't actually need to enter the Registry Editor to create this beast, but it certainly qualifies as a registry hack, as you're essentially using the registry's Globally Unique Identifiers to create a desktop shortcut to all those settings. While the God Mode folder is the most popular use for this method, its also worth noting that you can use it to create (or re-create) other system places like the Recycle Bin, My Computer, Libraries, and others.