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Maximizing Your Employee Benefits

Angie — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:07:13 -0400

The cost of employee benefits is a significant dollar amount for employers. Yet many employees don't utilize their benefits package to their full advantage. So how can you maximize your employee benefits? 401(k) plans, flexible spending accounts and hea

Providing Exceptional Service: Know The Mission

Mike — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 11:18:19 -0400

What it means to me to know the mission is to have a clear understanding of how my work will be used by the end users to accomplish their goals. Individuals across the team should be able to make this connection. The architect creating a systems v

Design Convergence

Erik — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 10:04:04 -0500

To build successful services in today's market, you need broad capabilities beyond one technology discipline. With today's mobile phones and tablet computers having the capability to play and record video, offer high speed connectivity, prov

Back to Basics: Why?

Mike — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 10:29:48 -0400

One lesson that I have learned over the years is that team success comes from everyone (or at a minimum all the key players) knowing how they contribute to the overall objective. A lesson I continue to collect, learn, lose sight of, and then lea

Attracting Quality Employees as a Small Business

Angie — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 10:42:11 -0400

How do you attract high quality employees when you are a small company? This is the question we face all the time. As a small growing company, how can we stand out to attract the best talent? As with all small businesses, we face many challenges in doin

Information Sharing: Exploiting the Data

Mike — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 21:16:18 -0400

In information sharing, relationships in the data, both obvious and not, are representations of real world associations and are a key to solving and preventing crime. In our experience, sometimes the data is rich enough to support traditional e

Responsibility Built-In

Erik — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:28:36 -0500

Responsibility is a complex topic that can involve authority, trust, and the non-repudiation of actions. It's complex because it tends to both enable action but also stymie it when it is used with a critical and non-constructive eye. At Elluminates Softwar

Entrepreneurism in the workspace

Erik — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:48:08 -0400

Just like sports can level the playing field across class, education and wealth, lack of employee investment can level the field between small and large businesses. While training and benefits, as well as industry competitive pay, are typical discussi

From Enterprise to Web Scale

Erik — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 08:52:01 -0400

A big difference for web technology startups that provide services that may have to scale to millions of users versus companies that provide consulting services is that the thought process for designing has to be radically different or you can easily

Fail Gracefully

Erik — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 09:55:53 -0400

We were working on a subsystem component for Openvista and we noticed an issue occurred with a third party's application we were testing against every so often. It is the type of problem you dread as a engineer; the frustrating intermittent issue. Aft

Elluminates Software Website

Erik — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 10:53:20 -0400

A quick note that our company's website has been updated at www.elluminates.com . A lot had happened since the original site was put online and we wanted it to better reflect what we have accomplished and where

Beta Test The Business

Erik — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:16:21 -0400

Too often technology companies focus too heavily on their technologies and not their business. As a technologist, I enjoy the technical nature of my work far more than the administrative aspects of my role. However, the administrative aspects allow the bus

Why is Common Sense Uncommon For Businesses?

Erik — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:52:46 -0400

The secrets of a successful business, career or relationship typically can be attributed to common sense and simple truths. For example, I am a strong believer in following through with what you promise, no matter if that is to our customers, our busi

Web Disruption

Erik — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:07:18 -0400

There has been a lot of work in the background these last few weeks. While that work continues, I thought I would take a moment to mention that Wolfram Alpha really has the potential to turn the concept of Sea

Talent isn't local

Erik — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:17:18 -0400

I remember working with two programmers that always spoke about the same topic with fear and trepidation at work. They were deathly afraid of being replaced or outsourced by India, or China or somewhere they imagined had millions of programmers lying

Less can be more

Erik — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 14:57:20 -0400

I remember sitting across from a potential Director level hire and asking him if he has any questions after the interview concluded. He asked a question I have rarely heard from interviewees: "So, how big do you want the company to get?"

Consulting for tomorrow

Erik — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:03:58 -0400

You find that a lot of product companies and their founders do consulting work to survive for a while. Consulting has several advantages over other methods of funding including helping you keep control of your company and its direction, allowing you to hav

Now Playing

Erik — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 12:48:12 -0400

As a follow up to my product update post, I want to announce that openvista.com is now accepting Sign Ups for beta testing. I do caution some patience - we are still getting things in place but we want to offer beta testing slots now so we can properl

Interview: Max Ventilla of Aardvark

Erik — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:07:09 -0400

I spoke with Max Ventilla of Aardvark to learn about his company that came out of stealth mode in March 2009. Max drives Aardvark's strategy and business development. He came from Google where he focused on strategy for Google's marketing and mone

Openvista Product Update

Erik — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:36:56 -0400

Writing about Entrepreneurism and capturing my conversations with CEOs, Founders and Venture Capitalists about startups I hope helps support your own enthusiasm for breaking out of the cubicle culture and into the world of startups. While I would

Love what you do

Erik — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 14:17:49 -0500

After starting my sports business in my teens, and my second business effort in my early twenties, which was focused on online media and technology (specifically Linux and Open Source), I decided to work for a few companies after graduating from my univers

David Young, CEO of Joyent Interview

Erik — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:38:43 -0500

Joyent is a Cloud Computing vendor of 'Infrastructure as a Service' (IaaS). Their main product is a line of virtualized servers called Joyent Accelerators. They focus on helping their clients move quickly from an idea to a web application with millions of

Why You Shouldn't Give Up

Erik — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:58:44 -0500

It's a tough time to be an entrepreneur. The economy is not making our jobs any easier to bring exciting businesses to life. Are we at the beginning of the end of the recession or the

37signals Interview: From the Beginning

Erik — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:28:30 -0500

Great companies have a vision and a set of ideals that binds people to them. There are plenty of companies that exist purely to make a buck, and many of them can, but they don't inspire us. Great companies also have great aspirations. I had the chance to s

Interview with August Capital's David Hornik

Erik — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:15:36 -0500

Venture Capital acts like grease on innovation's wheels. Investments help fund companies to improve on existing conceptualizations or change technical paradigms. However, given 2008's fourth quarter performance, which Sam Stovall, Chief Investment Strategi

Hiring 101: Building Great Teams

Erik — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 17:25:04 -0500

Hiring well is hard and might be near the number one critical success factor for a startup. You might have the greatest business ideas, the needed financial wherewithal and the raw talent of the founders to pull on, but if your ideas are ever to

Ruby in the Cloud, Devver Interview.

Erik — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:23:21 -0500

Object oriented programming has continued to make strides in recent years, with Java, C# and scripting languages like Python and Ruby being popular. Those who work with me at Elluminates Software know that I am a computer language junkie, and I tend to li

Entrepreneurial Workaholic Syndrome (EWS)

Erik — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:14:05 -0500

Do you have EWS? It may be contagious. It doesn't discriminate based on where you come from or what you look like. And it has side effects that others around you will notice. Symptoms of EWS may include but are not limited to: 1. Unable

Interview with Tobias Lutke: CEO of jadedPixel

Erik — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:06:59 -0500

In the continuing tradition of interviewing entrepreneurs, I had a chance to speak with Tobias Lutke. Tobi's list of accomplishments is already long, an includes being the creator of the popular Shopify e-commer

Startups: Lessons from the Fall

Erik — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:57:08 -0400

As I conveyed in my previous post about entrepreneurial risk management, I have learned to be more afraid of not trying than of failure. I worry about not moving fast enough to try an idea out or start designing and coding a new feature as a prototype than

Alchemy: Turning Risk into Gold

Erik — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:09:30 -0400

I've believed for a long time that it is my job to turn risk into gold. Not into the actual metal but something we value similarly: wealth. It's an odd way to think about work since usually what we think makes us money is doing some service or selling some

Interview with Jack Moffitt: MicroBlogs and More

Erik — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:40:44 -0400

No Entrepreneur's journey can be an island unto itself. Not only do you affect your employees' lives, but also your partners and investors. But you also live in a community in your industry that will provide opportunities to speak with others that are also

Pick Your Platform, Pick Your Problem

Erik — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:39:31 -0400

If you are in a position where you make choices about your company's technology, then a critical decision you have to make is how technology will be leveraged across the business. Regardless of the business you are in, the technology platforms you choose t

Bootstrapping....

Erik — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 21:01:16 -0400

Most people look at what others do to determine what they should do or how well they are doing. It's a natural thing to happen. My young daughter constantly learns just by watching other children and adults, and she surely has shown me that we are great mi