Ever since it’s launch a year ago, Microsoft BizSpark has been doing very well at helping startups become successful. They have been focused on helping startups accelerate their software development process and provided access to business resources and mentorship. They have accomplished this by not only providing the technical resources necessary for success, but by also facilitating access to the right partnerships, marketing channels, coaching, and leadership.

Up until now, BizSpark has taken a broad approach, creating a network of more than 25,000 startups in over 100 countries.

This spectrum of partners includes entrepreneur support organizations such as the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), European Business Angel Network (EBAN) and The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE). It also includes financial institutions such as HSBC, law firms, consultants, outsourcing organizations, and hosting companies such as Rackspace, GoGrid, GoDaddy and PEER 1.

Taking things a step further, Microsoft has launched BizSpark One.

“The idea behind BizSpark One is to cast a finer net using Silicon Valley best practices, and then lift the net up to find the startups that are most likely to succeed in the market and shape the industry’s future,” says Lewin. “Following the filtering process, our local subsidiaries in 10 countries will partner with the corporate team to help these startups to become the ‘ones to watch’ within the BizSpark program.”

Most interesting about BizSpark’s recent changes is the software that makes it all possible, Azure. Azure is a complete and scalable Microsoft cloud computing platform. It allows startups to develop their applications with minimal up front investment, taking care of their hosting, equipment, labor, and expansion costs to name a few. It features automatic on-demand resource allocation. BizSpark partners will receive 750 free compute hours per month for eight months.

This is a very exciting announcement, lowering the bar for developers to create innovative projects on a stable and scalable platform. Microsoft is definitely thinking outside the box this time, cutting out most of the busy work and uncertainty involved in a startup. If you’re already a BizSpark partner, feel free to tell us about your experience. If not and you’re startup needs a boost, it might be just what you need. Not sure what Azure can really do? Check out Seesmic.

Some of the most liveliest discussions here in the past have occurred around topics related to advertising networks.  Most of us have been an associated with an ad network at some point in time, some of us still are, while others have moved on to an ad rep or direct sales.  When joining an ad network or engaging an ad rep firm some sort of contract must be signed, however these contracts are far from boilerplate and most of us simply aren’t lawyers or don’t have the resources to retain one.  Here are 10+ things to consider when joining an ad rep firm:

1. Post-Term
If a rep firm or ad network has a post-term in the contract, where they still get paid on advertising (if they introduce your site to the advertiser)  you broker yourself or via another firm after the contract has ended , you should kill it if you can. Once the contract is up, the publisher needs to be totally free to do what he/she wants to do, without any claim to future revenues.  Gorilla Nation includes a post-term in their contracts.

2. Performance Clause
I would recommend some type of ratio of performance, where the ad rep firm is responsible to perform at a particular level. Especially, if a publisher has an exclusive deal, you need to make sure you are getting sufficient consideration every month if you are giving up exclusivity. You can put a performance clause in the contract such as for every 1M pageviews, the publisher needs to get 2K net revenue from the exclusive rep firm. If the site does 10M pageviews, the rep firm must perform and sell at least 20K per month on premium direct sales and if they don’t for 2-3 consecutive months, you should be able to get out of the contract. If a rep firm has a “star property” or anchor property, they will most likely focus on that property when pitching to advertisers, leaving the smaller publishers behind.

In addition to a performance clause, you need a clause that says the rep firm is responsible to provide with a quality service level. You want to think of as many “outs” as possible, with “outs” being options to get out of your contract.

3.  Leave Some Room to Sell Some of Your Inventory on Your Own
Leave some room for you to handle some of your direct sales. It’s important for publishers to build traffic and scale first but if you grow very fast, you need the flexibility to start selling a portion of your own ads, with your own direct sales team. You could select a category such as music to focus on and give the rest to the rep firm. As you get bigger and stronger, you can then negotiate more away from the rep firm.

4. Play Rep Firms Against Each Other
Negotiate from a position of power, once you find more than one rep firm that is interested, you should use this interest as leverage. “X is offering me a better deal, can you beat these terms”

5. Set Your Own Rate Card, Don’t rely on the rep firm
This needs to be in the contract. The rep firm may be trying to sell you too low or too high. You need full flexibility to determine the pricing of your brand/site. You can work with the rep firm but you should have complete control over your rate card.

6. Ask How Many Account Reps do they have per site within your vertical
If the reps are overly stretched and your site doesn’t have a large following 500 UV’s+, don’t expect a lot of attention and support.

7. Net Payment Terms
Anything beyond net 60 is suspect.  However, if the CPM’s are high and the partner has a good reputation, I think you can go with 90 but nothing beyond net 90.

8. Misc Fees Deducted from Your Revenue, on top of the revenue split
Beware of shady terms such as the ad network or rep firm having the ability to deduct fees from your revenue, in addition to the revenue share. Some firms will try to be slick and say they can deduct fees related to trafficking, ad serving, and sales, in addition to their revenue share. This is unacceptable and an obvious red flag.

9. How many employees does the rep firm have?
Beware of big promises. If a firm has 1-3 employees or the key executive you’re working with is working from home, these are obvious red flags. What this could mean is that this firm doesn’t have the bandwidth to effectively sell your brand to Fortune 500 companies.

10. Beware of firms that sell Black only, not Quality
If a rep firm is “selling” their business on the fact that is Black owned and not on the quality of their partners, sales, growth, financials, etc., this is a red flag.  You shouldn’t care who owns the rep firm and you should weigh firms on their merits and what they can do for your business.  Young “pro Black” publishers/bloggers often “buy into the kool aid” and get exploited by these type of ad shops. I personally had to threaten AdGroups after I smelled some “shady” dealings/practices. “I don’t care if you’re Black owned, where is my money?”

Bonus

11. Provision for M&A
If your website is acquired on a M&A deal, you need to be able to get out of the contract as an acquirer would most likely want to go in a different direction on ad sales. If you are “locked tight” into a contract, this may influence your deal price or prevent a deal from even going down. You need a “M&A out”.

12.  Beware of the Auto-renew
Some firms require a 30-45 days notice or they will auto rnew your contract and you could be stuck with them for another year.  Obviously this is not ideal especially if you are unhappy with the ad rep or they haven’t preformed to your expectations and you’d like to try alternatives.  If you are already in an auto-renew situation mark your calendar to send your contact termination notice.  Don’t get caught slippin’.  Gorilla Nation includes auto-renew in their standard contracts.

13. Consult an Online Advertising/New Media Lawyer No Matter What
Or someone who specializes in online advertising/new media. Even if you don’t have any money, you can find a lawyer who will work with you where you can pay them later or break up the balance into payments.  I don’t care how smart you think you are, if your site blows up, a bad deal or some “uneven” clause only a slick lawyer would understand who wrote the contract in the interest of the rep firm could end up costing you millions!

I spend easily 50% of my time reading about technology startups. Watching them get funded, seeing what business models take off and reading the stories of how they went from idea to executed company.  There are so many new technology companies being created everyday. Some fail, some succeed but the great part is that people are taking the chance to create something. One of the things that frustrates me is the lack of African Americans creating technology-based start-ups. Before people start jumping at me saying, “What are your talking about I’m a Black tech entrepreneur?!”

You have to admit that even if you are one or know one, there are not enough of them.   And I don’t buy the argument that we can’t because we have shown creativity and innovation in almost everything we do. When I was running GlobalGrind I was fortunate enough to go to places like Facebook and meet employees from well-known startups like Ning and Digg. What I was always impressed with was the environment of creativity that existed among these people and how everyone there was keenly focused on solving problems. Yes, they were all making money but you could quickly tell that was only part of the value proposition for them. I would always say to myself that if more minority teens knew that there are places to work like Facebook and other startups, and more importantly they can create companies just like this, they would line up around the block to learn how to do it. So what is it? Why in this age of opportunity does Black Web 2.0  have maybe 2 startups to cover a week while sites like Techcrunch cover about 10 a day?

I believe we have to change the value proposition of urban youth. We need to help them understand how great the opportunities are and how much easier it is to start your own company than they think. When I speak to teens at events I usually ask them if they knew that there was a guy who, using free software, in his dorm room created something and he is now worth more than P-Diddy, Jay-Z, and Russell Simmons combined. People rarely guess that I’m talking about Mark Zuckerberg and that he did that in about 5 years.  But after that remark I usually have their attention.

Being a pro athlete or an entertainer is great but the odds are extremely high for people to have careers in those fields. But that is who they see and the problem is that our youth don’t see people they can identify with in technology entrepreneurial roles so they don’t believe it is in the realm of possibility for them. Yes, they love to use Facebook but they never think that they can create the next Facebook. So I ask the question what can we do to change their value proposition. Let’s talk about any ideas people have and start working to making this become reality for our youth.  I would love to hear your thoughts.

Here are some good articles to read:
Youth Use Entrepreneurship as a Pathway to Success

Teen Tips for Entrepreneurship

Lesson Plans for Young Entrepreneurs

As of late we’ve seen so many traditional Black/Urban Media companies either redesign as blogs, create blog properties as part of their holdings, or transform their content channels into blogs.  In nearly every case that I’ve seen this happen not one company has been able to knock it out of the park.  In many cases they merely bunt it. Cases in point…

Vibe relaunching as a blog

Essence.com’s latest redesign

BlackVoices building up their stable of blogs that mirror content channels (BVonStyle,BVonSports, BVonMoney, etc.)

Interactive One adding blogs to their holdings and then tacking those properties on the BlackPlanet.com domain

You get the picture.

Surely blogs have some kind of undeniable allure.  In some cases they are guilty pleasures.  In Media they are the new kids on the block that some love to hate while others embrace.  In mainstream media there is M&A activity in the blogosphere.  Media companies don’t necessarily feel the need to recreate the wheel, challenge what already exists, or create their own.  Long term that would take too much time and resources.  They simply either take a strategic investment or acquire.

My biggest question and concern is why doesn’t this same activity happen in Black Media.  Instead of resulting to the typical “crabs in a barrel” answer I’m genuinely curious to find out what is missing in our economy that we have yet to see this type of activity in recent times.  Especially when Essence is feeling the backlash of their community on their new redesign, Black Voices’ traffic despite trying to incorporate blogs is in a huge slump, and of all Interactive One’s properties Black Planet still out shines many of their properties by light years.  If these companies wanted to diversify their portfolio by adding blogs or appeal to a young audience by “acting” like a blog wouldn’t it make more sense just to acquire a blog that is aligned with your brand and what you are trying to build?  You wouldn’t have to start from scratch, the traffic would already be there, and 9 times out of 10 the overhead would be ridiculously low….lower than the staff that is needed to “act” like a blog.  I know it is a recession but M&A activity isn’t necessarily down.  Sure it is no free for all but it is alive in a smarter and more strategic way.

What kind of economy are we creating if independent media doesn’t happen on some sort of liquidity event?  This needs to at least be an option and at most serve as an example of possibilities.  Not to mention strategically it makes more sense to acquire rather than wait for independent media to seek investment from an IAC, MSNBC, and the like or bootstrap their way to the top.  Then they really become your competitors…head on.

Wetoku is a video service which makes it dead simple to interview someone and share that video interview. They call this bringing the “talking heads” experience to your viewers. Once the recording is complete, you can copy the embed code and paste it into your blog or website. You can also get a link directly to the interview, hosted on Wetoku, and share it that way.

Once you’ve created your Wetoku account, creating an interview is as simple as clicking Start your interview. This will prompt your for a Title for the interview along with the Interviewer and Interviewee. Then, you will get a link that you will send to the person you want to interview (the interviewee). Once they click the link and you have both authorized Wetoku to access your camera, you’re good to go. It’s really that simple, just hit record.

During the recording, you can chat with each other off camera, which is sometimes useful to keep a live recording cohesive and flowing. There is nothing worse than a rambling video interview. Many might want to compare Wetoku with TinyChat or other video chat services, but many of those treat their videos as disposable. Your video disappears into the wind, never to be seen again. Still other services make video recording and publishing simple, but don’t provide a method for interviewing someone remotely, you’d have to be physically next to the interviewee.

While Wetoku does provide a solid product, there is one primary improvement that I would like to see and that is the ability to edit the resulting interview. Sometimes, you need to cut out parts, add an intro or outtro, maybe clarify things with captions. Currently, none of this is possible. The best solution would be for Wetoku to provide simple video editing online, but this might be a little much for them to handle alone. Second best solution would be to allow you to download the video so that you could edit it with the software of your choosing.

For an example of Wetoku in action, check out our interview with Windows 7 Program Manager Cordell Jones. Go get your Wetoku account (it’s free, after all) and tell us what you think.

I decided to make the trek out to Berkeley to check out this year’s Startup School (and to let it serve as a serious peptalk–it’s working).  Startup School has been held since 2006 by the folks behind Y Combinator, a venture capital firm that specializes in funding early stage startups.  Teams can raise up to $20,000 and get advice from and connections to some of the top folks in startups.

Speakers this year were: Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator; Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired and author; Jason Fried, founder of 37 Signals; Tony Hsieh, CEO at Zappos; Greg McAdoo, partner at Sequoia Capital; Biz Stone & Ev Williams, founders at Twitter; Paul Bucheit, founder of FriendFeed and creator of Gmail; Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus and creator of Lotus 1-2-3; and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook.

Paul Graham (Founder of Y Combinator)

Paul Graham started off the morning rehashing his list from the essay What Startups Are Really Like.

Greg McAdoo (Partner at Sequoia Capital)

McAdoo showed up as the lone VC in the group of presenters and gave practical advice on getting users and pitching VCs.

• Prefers personal introductions rather than pitches out of the blue.  He recommended contacting the founders of companies he’s funded and asking them to introduce you to him.  Left the audience with email address (mcadoo at sequoiacap dot com), however.
• Do your research on who you raise money from (due diligence goes both ways).
• Focus on disruptive market opportunities.  ”The cost of penetrating an incumbent market is higher during a recession.”
• Sequoia wants big markets.  They’ve funded the likes of Apple, Cisco, Google, PayPal, and the list goes on.

Jason Fried (Founder at 37 Signals)

I’m personally biased  toward thinking a lot of Jason’s talk since I identify with most of the stuff he’s already said elsewhere. First off, contrary to the whole idea of Y Combinator, Jason’s a fan of self-funding startups. He highlighted two differences between bootstrapped companies and funded companies, i.e., a bootstrapped company looks to make money while a funded company looks to spend money. Furthermore, Jason says being a bootstrapped company helps you get used to making money in the first place. It’s a skill. On that note, Fried said, “The more you practice, the less difficult it will be.”

More high points:

• “Planning is guessing, so then you can take it a little less seriously.”  He’s never been a fan of business plans or extensive design documents.
• “Software has no edges–software is not affected by physics. Nothing pushes back and it will start expanding over time. We (developers) need to be the edges. Keep things out of your software.”  This goes back to 37 Signals’s book, Getting Real–specifically, Start with No (Make features work hard to be implemented).
• “You can’t make just one thing: everything you make has a by-product.” 37 Signals has made a juicy side business out of selling what they know and most of the time that content comes straight from their blog. He gave the example of sawdust and how it used to be a waste product. Now, it makes up plywood and the bedding for guinea pig cages. Everything has a by-product. Monetizing that stuff goes back to making money and how “the more you practice, the less difficult it will be.”
• “USEFUL > Innovative”  Don’t put something out just because it’s cool, but really doesn’t add any value.
• “Someone anointing you to be successful is bullsh-t!” Explains why he didn’t take investment in 37 Signals until much later in the game.
• “Failure is not a rite of passage.”  You don’t necessarily have to fail.  Fried goes on further to say that, “What you learn from your mistakes is not as valuable as what you learn from your successes.”  Whether we’re talking about life or startups, I think he’s both right and wrong, i.e., my time in college is littered with failures that I learned more from and now appreciate more than if I’d been successful in those same situations.  Each case is different.
• On pricing, he asks the simple question, “Would I pay for it?”  That doesn’t help fully determine the price, but it’s a good way to figure out if you have something people would pay for.
• “Price forces you to be really damn good.”
• “People say 9/10 businesses fail, but what does that have to do with you? Those are their failures.”  I liked this as a kick in the head not to take too much to heart what people say about failure in business.  People like to scare with statistics, of course, but why not shoot to be the one that doesn’t fail?

Chris Anderson (Editor in Chief at Wired)

Anderson has really been a huge advocate lately of giving stuff away–not to the point of becoming a non-profit, but instead, offering free products in order to get people hooked enough to pay.  Obviously, it’s not a new idea, but it’s one startups have really come to embrace.  Fred Wilson coined the term freemium for that idea back in 2006.

In Anderson’s eyes, free users are not freeloaders.  Instead, free users are a way to expose apps to the widest possible audience.  The goal then, is to find a way to get people to pay for a better version of the app (or whatever is being sold) once they’ve fallen in love with the free version and need something it doesn’t offer but other paid versions do.

What will people pay for?  According to Anderson:

1. People will pay to save time.
2. People will pay to lower risk.
3. People will pay for things they love.
4. People will pay for status.
5. People will pay if you make them (once they’re hooked!).

Then, he launched into a list of freemium models.

1. Feature-limited: the free version is actually useful, but has some limitation that encourages power users to convert up to a more useful/flexible version.
2. Time-limited: really easy to do, but doesn’t encourage commitment since users get cut off after the trial period is over.
3. Capacity-limited: think storage services where you get 2GB or so for free and then once they’ve hooked you into storing that much, you upgrade to a higher capacity account.
4. Seat-limited: charge on a per user basis.  It’s easy to do, but encourages cheating.
5. Customer class-limited: easy to do, but hard to enforce.  Gave the example of Microsoft’s BizSpark which gives away all of Microsoft’s software free to startups that are writing software, privately held, less than three years old, and generating less than $1M in revenue annually.

Anderson wrote the book Free: the Future of a Radical Price and the audiobook is available here (285MB Zip file)…for free-99.

Paul Bucheit (Founder of FriendFeed, creator of Gmail)

Bucheit winged things a bit and gave his life story.  I was most moved by his advice: “It’s important to do things that make you feel uncomfortable.”  Cliché, but I figure some of the most basic truths always seem that way after a while.

Biz Stone & Ev Williams (Founders of Twitter)

True to form, the guys took questions from the audience via Twitter after going on for a few minutes about how Twitter got started, technical issues (it’s a joy to see the Fail Whale a lot less these days!), and things they’ve found to be surprising about Twitter.  Biz talked about being surprised about how Twitter influences people’s movements at times, i.e., a guy tweeted about one bar being too crowded at SXSW and that he was going to another bar.  Thanks to having tweeted about it, everyone crowded into the bar he was going to.

Mark Zuckerberg (Founder of Facebook)

His session was an interview format with Jessica Livingston rather than prepared remarks.  A lot of his session was rehashing how Facebook got started, etc.  Zuckerberg dropped a few gems later, though, including:

• “Eventually you get judged not by how things look, but the value you provide to people.”
• “The biggest risk you can take is no risk at all.”
• “Don’t make the mistake of trying to be too perfect.”
• Figure out what users want more of from what they’re already doing on the site.

Mitch Kapor (Designer of Lotus 1-2-3)

Talked about company culture and how startups can be horrible in that regard, i.e., research shows that startups have more public humiliation and bullying than regular companies.  Kapor also emphasized the idea of a “Meritocracy vs. a Mirrortocracy.”  He thinks that startups often confuse talent with “people like us.”  In some respects, that’s a whole ‘nother post, but for another day.  Kapor also implored founders to “Walk the walk yourself–mind the gap between stated values and actual practice.”  There’s a Wall Street joke in there somewhere…

Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos)

Hsieh talked about customer service, company culture, core values, and positive psychology.  His talk was different in that he deeply emphasized the soft aspects of running a business instead of the usual pontifications on just profits.  On vision, he said: “What you’re thinking, think bigger.”  Then, he asked the audience, “What is your goal in life?”  and “What would you be happy doing for the next 10 years even if it didn’t make a dime?”  On values, he talked about the concept of “committable values,” as in “values that you’re willing to hire and fire people based on.”  For Hsieh, at the end of the day, Zappos is not about delivering shoes, but about “delivering happiness.”

Finally, he recommended a few books:  Good to Great and Tribal Leadership (the audiobook is available for free from Zappos’ website).  Also, Zappos publishes a book about company culture.  Gave his email address (ceo at zappos dot com) which you can use to ask for a free copy.  Slides from his talk are available here.

Mark Pincus (CEO of Zynga)

Pincus was the last up and gave a talk about being a world-class CEO.  Some high points:

• “Who gives a sh-t what your valuation is–only your ego!”  This one hit home not because of having to worry about a valuation right now (I struggled for while myself with how valuable I thought anything I’d done might be), but because it reinforced the idea of not doing things for that very reason.  CEOs and big heads don’t mix.
• “An internet treasure is something where consumers can’t imagine what life was like before it.” Google and most things they put out come to mind here.  Strive to create something of that calibre.

Overall, it was a great event that served as a nice pep-talk en masse.  And funniest of all, the peer pressure is building up to move to San Francisco, but we’ll see what happens.

Editor’s Note:  Twitter and Y Combinator just announced a partnership for start-ups using the API, they have a similar partnership with Justin.tv, check out the full coverage about the RFS (Request for Start-up’s) and RFS extension over at TechCrunch.

Karl Cassell and Gregory Jackson, principals of Our Community, LLC decided to fill a void in Cedar Rapids, Iowa with the creation of an Internet radio station KOJC.com. The startup borrows its name from a now defunct broadcast entity that went out of business in the 1990s. The first station was a community station run by a local non-profit, Oakhill-Jackson Community. Cassell and Jackson’s venture is for profit though they’ve yet to start turning one.

Cassell continues to keep his day job as executive director of the Cedar Rapids Civil Rights Commission as Jackson, a former Rockwell Collins engineer tends to the day-to-day operations of the Internet station. Both have leveraged their relationships and backgrounds to develop support for KOJC.com.

The Cedar Rapids GazetteOnline.com reports:

Cassell and Jackson started the venture with their own money, and are covering operating expenses until the station gains a sound financial footing. The station’s slogan is “Keep on jamming continuously,” and that’s what it does, operating from the Paul Engle Center for Neighborhood Arts, 1600 Fourth Ave. SE. Cassell and Jackson hope to attract advertising and contributions from community organizations and large employers who agree with the station’s goals of community engagement and projecting a positive image for Cedar Rapids’ African-American community. Jackson gets excited when he talks about the growing traffic on the site. The New KOJC gets hits from as far away as Slovenia and Spain.

(Photos courtesy GazetteOnline.com/Stephen Mally)

]]> http://www.blackweb20.com/2009/09/25/entrepreneurs-in-cedar-rapids-ia-create-internet-radio-startup-for-black-community/feed/ 0 http://www.blackweb20.com/2009/09/21/dame-dash-gets-magnetic-with-new-business-venture/ http://www.blackweb20.com/2009/09/21/dame-dash-gets-magnetic-with-new-business-venture/#comments Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:30:27 +0000 Sherri L. Smith http://www.blackweb20.com/?p=7923

Once upon a time, Damon Dash was one of the biggest names in Hip-Hop.  Co-founder of Roc-A-Fella Records and clothing line Rocawear, and owner or PRO-KEDS, Dash was definitely a mover and shaker. According to NYMag.com, at one time he had a “$400,000 car, a cook, a butler, and 1,300 pairs of sneakers.” But nothing lasts forever and the man who used to “donate his once-worn Socks to charity,” has hit hard times with the New York Daily News reporting on his financial and personal woes including his recent split with wife Rachel Roy.

Refusing to be a “Hip-Hop Flop,” Dame has persevered and appeared in the BET reality show Ultimate Hustler and made his entry into theater production with the Off-Broadway show, “Hip-Hop Monologues”, based on the life of rapper Jim Jones.  Dash’s latest business has him throwing his hat in the the internet radio arena. Called Magnet Radio, the comeback mogul is trying to keep things light on his return to music.

“It’s not about getting money or all the ads, or things like that it’s really about giving people a platform to hear good music…I think the whole world is getting ready to turn for that. It feels like good music is gonna take the forefront and people with a good show. I think that’s the good business model.”

In addition to Magnet Radio, Dash is also said to be launching a TV venture called Creative Control and he’s begun shooting a documentary which he will share production duties with rapper/actor Mos Def. There’s also the Blak Roc Project, a rap/rock album featuring O-Tip, Ludacris, and Raekwon.

Magnet Radio is not Dash’s first attempt at an Internet startup. In the mid 90s, Dash and his cousin Darien Dash formed the Digital Mafia that received lots of press and kudos. And two years ago, he started the now defunct BlockSavvy.com.

At press time, there has been no mention of a launch date, just a statement that the station is “gonna launch in a couple weeks.”

When most of us were 12, we were playing video games, developing our first crushes, and getting ready for junior high. Twin brothers Ashton and Ryan Clark, were starting the first in a long line of online businesses. Circuitbreakers.com, an online consumer electronics hub, provided the seed money for a host of business and beginning of a bright business future for the enterprising young boys.

Fast forward to 2009 and the Clarks are in their senior year of college at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and have continued to pursue their passion for business and technology. Under the company name of Dynamic Duo, their mission is simple — to empower your visions through the design and creation of quality websites. To date, the twins operate seven successful web enterprises including their latest sites, Dynamic Apps and Hostivo.

The brainchild of Ryan Clark, Dynamic Apps conducts market research on Facebook and iPhone applications and helps developers create apps that users want and need. Still in the early stages of development, Dynamic Apps is still compiling information and preparing to create its first applications. Hostivo is a design company that produces websites and provides hosting services for companies looking to bring their great ideas to fruition.

But at its heart, Dynamic Duo is all about designing great websites, project, time, and resource management.

“We want to take the best ideas [from Dynamic Apps] and we want to make them happen via Hostivo,” says Ashton. “So the stuff that we’re doing now is all interconnected. We’re using pretty much all of the resources that we’ve developed over the last several years to make this happen. That’s what I call being resourceful.”

In addition to exploring the app world, the twins are also interested in getting into the world of cloud computing, but only  if they can work with the right partner. It’s not a question of capability more than expertise. Since Dynamic Duo is just that, a two man crew that outsources as they need additional hands, the savvy businessmen would rather team up with a company that brings expertise to the table.

And it is the twins expertise in tech, business, and knowing their own limitations and how to compensate when needed that has put Dynamic Duo on the fast track to success. As they set their eyes on the world of corporate America, Ashton sums it up:

“If you’re passionate about something, you don’t have to wait.  You can do it now because it’s your passion. And with that said, you should know everything about that space…You need to understand the key players in the space, what makes them successful because if you’re going to be doing something, you need to know what other people did to make them successful.”

Keep your eyes on the Clark twins because they are blazing a trail for the next generation of black technorati and entrepreneurs.

If you are looking for capital and are an early stage company (which I know many of you are) it doesn’t get much better than Ron Conway.  Conway was an early stage investor in companies like Google, Ask Jeeves, and Paypal and is known for the number of investments he has made in start-ups.  He has backed companies like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Zoomr, PBWiki, and many, many more.  Needless to say he is a heavy hitter in the angel community as well as the Web 2.0 community, having made more investments in Web 2.0 start-ups than any other investor (somewhere in the 500 neighborhood).  You can read more about him across the web, including criticism that he has come under.  Early this summer, June to be exact, TechCrunch reported that Conway will be focusing his investments over the next 18 months in 40-50 start-ups who are exploiting Real-time data.  He believes it is “the next billion dollar market opportunity.”

He will be speaking on raising angel capital on October 13th at the Gunderson Dettmer office in Silicon Valley in an intimate setting limited to just 40 attendees.  There is a $25 honorarium to attend that will go to the Peapod Foundation.  The Peapod Foundation was started by will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas to support social issue for children around the world. You can read more about it on Peapod’s website.

Attending this event is a great opportunity to not only network, but to get in front of one of the most powerful angel investors in the industry. And guess what…we were able to get 5 slots reserved specifically for Black Web 2.0 readers! You’ll still have to pay the $25 honorarium but it is a small price to pay for what could be a game changing opportunity. If you aren’t located on the Westcoast it is still well worth the flight and opportunity.  Hint, hint…I hear Southwest has a sick Web Special going on right now $99 LGA to SFO for October 13th .  The first 5 comments (via actually commenting on BW2.0 not tweets, lol) are the lucky few who get put on the attendee list.  Have at it!