Visiting Geneva

Will be in Geneva this weekend until Tuesday morning. If you’re in or around the city and would like to meet up drop me a line.

TicketLeap: Ticketing made easy?

Guy Kawasaki reviews TicketLeap today, a new online service that democratises ticket (to paraphrase Guy). Having an interest in the company, Guy is obviously full of praise for these guys, however it went over to TicketLeap.com to check it out for myself and it’s most definitely an ace service. Here’s a quick run-down of what I found:

1. Sign up is straightforward but they manage to muck it up slightly with the ZIP code section. It only accepts numbers (i.e. US format) but most countries have letters in the ZIP (e.g. UK). So I had to enter a fake one to sign up.
2. Great guidance. Once you sign up successfully you get a simple-to-understand list of next steps and things to do without too much unnecessary jabber and marketing talk.
3. Creating an event is also simple and takes about 4 minutes if you already know the venue, times and so on. A great feature is the possibility of adding a seating chart. Really cool stuff guys… but same problem with the ZIP code.
4. Next you choose ticket options. Not too complicated but provides a good set of features, including limiting number of tickets and defining multiple ticket types (e.g. student, premium, etc). TicketLeap will charge a fee per ticket (that seems to be their business model) and you get to choose who pays it (you, the buyer, or an even split).
5. Finally you get options to invite people (from Gmail, etc) and a bunch of useful stuff like custom website badges for direct purchase links and so on).

Overall it seems like a great service. Particularly in view of the fact that it does not require the event organiser to get involved in technicalities of merchant accounts, shopping carts and all that irritatingly complex stuff.

It will be interesting to see how it compares with Amiando, a similar service that I hope to find time to look at well in the coming days.

What the Zude…

Scoble has written some pretty positive stuff about Zude today so I went over to check it out. Zude is supposed to help the peasants build websites - a la MySpace but better - and while the video interviews on Scoble’s site are pretty cool, this is what I got when I signed up to Zude and asked it to show me the default page with absolutely no customisation at all:

(The link to the actual page is here).

OK so I’m viewing it in Safari. On a Mac. But hey, this should be basic stuff or am I missing something?

What’s The Fuss?

This blog is intended to be a coming-together-place of snippets, thoughts and ideas about entrepreneurship, creativity, and simplicity.

The main driving topic will be early-stage entrepreneurship, or in more conventional words, “start-ups”. The terminology is important however because I take ‘early-stage entrepreneurship’ to mean something slightly different from ’start-up’. Or rather, slightly more focused.

Typically, a start-up is a business venture that is in the process of commencing operations based on a specific business idea/model. In other words, the entrepreneur and her team have come up with a business idea and are executing. ‘Early-stage’ however refers to the subset of start-ups within which there has not yet been made a significant commitment of resources to a specific idea/model. Both the idea and the organisation are still fairly ‘embryonic’ at this point and can still be changed, moulded and refined much more easily that would be the case at a later stage.

Secondly, I use early-stage entrepreneurship and not early-stage start-ups to emphasise the innovation element. Every new venture is a start-up yet arguably not every one is necessarily entrepreneurial. I like to differentiate between ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘businessperson’, lightly defining the distinction as being that the former is being somewhat innovative while the latter is simply trading using tried-and-tested ways.

So early-stage entrepreneurship is all about the subset of new ventures that are in an innovative idea development phase.