Ted Murphy Ted Murphy’s Personal Blog

I have been working on a new super-secret project with the IZEA team for the past couple of months. While the new service has many aspects, one of the bets we are making is huge growth in mobile photo sharing via smart phones. I love the quality of my digital SLR, but I rarely have it with me when I want to capture a special moment. When I do have my SLR it may take me a few days to download photos to my computer, then upload them back to a photo sharing service like Flickr.

Taking pictures with my iPhone is exactly the opposite. I always have it with me and it is extremely easy for me to share my photos instantly via the iPhone’s Internet connection. Sure, the quality isn’t as good but the immediacy and social aspects make up for it. I am not alone in my usage habits. The iPhone 3G is the most popular camera on all of Flickr.

In 2010 the total number of images captured on camera phones will reach 228 billion, exceeding the number of photos taken on digital still cameras and film cameras combined. Mobile photos are going to be big business. Some would say they already are. As time goes on the quality of the cameras embedded in mobile devices will only get better. Eventually people will simply ditch their stand-alone cameras in favor of their smart phone.

If you are working on the next big startup you may want to consider how you can take advantage of this tremendous area of growth. I am.

Anyone who has worked with me knows that I am not a huge fan of meetings. I like my meetings short, sweet, small and productive. I think my distaste for meetings came out of my experience running agencies. In the agency business time is literally money. Every minute you spend is either billable (costs the client) or non-billable (costs the agency) and both scenarios can be very expensive. When you have ten people in an meeting for one hour billing an average of $175 per hour your meeting just cost $1,750. You better make damn sure you all needed to be there and actually accomplished something.

Enter Bring TIM!

I stumbled on this product this weekend and immediately placed an order. Bring TIM is a meeting cost calculator. You bring it to a meeting (I am going to leave it in the conference room), dial in the average hourly rate and number of people and hit start. You can see the cost of the meeting in real time so everyone is aware of just how expensive the time is. In my opinion this is a must have for any business, especially those that bill clients based on time (I want to get my lawyer one).

I have no doubt that this will freak out some of my team members but I can’t wait to put it into action. You can order your own here for $24.99.

The other day I was sitting in a meeting with my lead developers at IZEA. I asked each of them a question I often ask, “how are you feeling?” I went around the table and most of them said “good” - with one exception. That individual responded with “I’m nervous” to which I responded, “good, you should be”. That is no doubt a strange response from the leader of a company, but it is not the first time I have given it.

The truth is I want my team members to be a little nervous. Not nervous for the sake of being nervous, but nervous because they care about what they are working on. This particular developer is leading a team that is rolling out IZEA’s next big service. We are less than a month away from the launch date and there are plenty of little issues (and some big ones) that have to be addressed. There is a ton of excitement… but there are also a lot of unknowns. All of us want this to be a huge success and we have invested time and money into making it work. Should this person be nervous? HELL YEAH! I am.

I’m nervous like a heavy weight boxer stepping in to the ring.

I look at every new initiative as a new fight for the belt. I have won some and I have lost some, but every time I step in to the ring I am full of an unexplainable energy that keeps me from being complacent or over confident in my abilities. I can’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking over the win/loss scenarios. I think about every detail. My legs bounce… my eyes twitch. I am consumed by the task at hand. My heart and mind are committed to success.

So…. when a fellow leader in my organization tells me they are nervous about a launch I am happy. I want them to be nervous. I want them to be attached. I want them to be thinking about where things can wrong. I want them to feel like they are in my corner of the ring. I want them to be ready to come out strong and go the distance.

You are nervous because you care. You are nervous because you want to win. I love that. Let’s kick some ass.

If you are like me you have a huge collection of iTunes music that is mislabeled and/or doesn’t have cover art. Enter TuneUp for iTunes. TuneUp is a simple app that acts as an extension to iTunes. It allows you to scrub through your music library and “automagically” clean everything up. One second your track reads “track 4″, the next second it has full song, artist, album, year, cover art and other meta data.

I bought the $29.95 gold package and have been using it for a couple of months. I find it incredibly accurate and useful. The only thing I don’t like about it is you can only clean 500 songs at a time. I give it 4/5 Tongues.

So you have decided to start your own business. You have done your research, created your business plan and have some money to get started. Great! Now what? Well, the first thing you need to do is create a legal entity so you can request a federal tax id, setup a bank account and so on. For small businesses that intend to stay small that usually means incorporating with the state in which you currently reside. However, if you plan on building the next monster company you should contemplate incorporating in Delaware instead of your home state.

Many institutional investors prefer Delaware corporations and some may even require you to reincorporate in Delaware prior to an investment. Why? Because Delaware has a separate Court of Chancery, a business court. The Court of Chancery does not use juries and the judges are appointed based on merit, not public election. Because there are no juries, decisions issued from the Chancery Court are done so as written opinions. The opinions create a large body of legal precedent for the investors to rely on, making it the most business friendly state to incorporate in from a legal standpoint. Investors like that.

There are a few other benefits to incorporating in Delaware:

• You don’t need to be a resident of Delaware.
• Non-Delaware Businesses don’t pay Delaware Corporate Taxes.
• Different kinds of business can be transacted under one corporate roof.
• Shareholders can act in writing instead of holding meetings.
• You can add people to the board who are not shareholders.
• One person can act as the only officer, director and shareholder of a corporation.

The state of Delaware has a booklet dedicated to the subject if you want more details. Corporations and LLCs of Delaware are permitted to run their businesses in all 50 states and foreign countries. You can incorporate for as little as $79.00 (no, I have never used these guys) and the ongoing cost of operations are relatively low.

Please note: I am not an attorney, financial advisor or tax expert. You should consult your own counsel prior to making any business decisions.