Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Stuart Mease wants to keep up with you on Twitter

Stuart Mease wants to keep up with you on Twitter

To find out more about Twitter visit http://twitter.com/i/8cd57a6d9259c8dcb22fb6ccd3b58f38f2df821f

Thanks,
— The Twitter Team

About Twitter

Twitter is a unique approach to communication and networking based on the simple concept of status. What are you doing? What are your friends doing—right now? With Twitter, you may answer this question over SMS or the Web and the responses are shared between contacts.

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Wednesday, June 10, 2009

New Contributor to the Blog

We will be having a new contributor to the VBIA blog - the current President of VBIA and VT KnowedlegeWorks in Blacksburg, Virginia - Jim Flowers. Thank you Jim for contributing to this site.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Forced/Recession Entrepreneurship

There have been a number of articles written about the rise of entrepreneurship during the economic downturn. In Roanoke, we had over 140 people come to a workshop. VT KnowledgeWorks also has a session coming up in April.

CEO for Cities wrote this entertaining blog post about forced entrepreneurship and the importance of it for job creation.

Jon Roberts of TIP Strategies also made the simple yet clear point recently "Companies are in the business of creating profits, not jobs. Economic developers, politicians and government officials are using the wrong metric (job creation). The metric should be how many profitable companies have you started and the by-product will be job creation."

Could the silver lining in this dark economic cloud be the emergence of more business start ups by entrepreneurs?

Does Place Matter When Starting a Business?

Penelope Trunk's blog post is very insightful in determining where to launch your business. She argues starting in Silicon Valley is "stupid". It gives ammunition to incubators who may be confronted by a client about such a move.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Importance of SMEs by Jim Flowers

Jim Flowers author of Start with Moxie and architect behind VTKnowledgeWorks generated this interesting post about the importance of SMEs (small-to-medium enterprises). As defined these are businesses employing less than 50 people.

Obviously in this economic climate more entrepreneurs are needed. The soil is fertile as many organization like VBIA are offering many resources. Contact one today and help turn around your local economy.

Monday, August 4, 2008

Rofo Finding Space for Startups

Rofo is a web site finding cheap space for start ups. It is a pretty fascinating model for incubators to look at in terms of fulfilling the needs of its clients as discussed on Tech Crunch. What are your thoughts? Will it work in a non-major metropolitan area?

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Member Incubator VT Knowledge Works is Blogging. Are You?

VT KnowledgeWorks - located in Blacksburg at the Corporate Research Center - has a very informative blog and uses it quite well in disseminating information, and creating the incubator's online presence.

The blog Inside VT KnowledgeWorks highlights member events, displays videos of member's technology, and provides an overall online forum for members to interact and discuss various topics.

If your incubator is not blogging, then use Inside VT KnowledgeWorks as an example. It's cost effective and much easier than you think to setup.