This is a guest post by Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur turned VC.  He sold his second company to Salesforce.com, becoming VP of Product Management. He joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a General Partner focusing on early-stage technology companies. Read more about Suster on his blog at Bothsidesofthetable and on Twitter at @msuster.

Creativity.  I’ve always believed it’s been one of the most important attributes of business success yet something very few business leaders talk about.  So I thought I’d write a post about how I drive my personal creativity.

As a practitioner of creativity rather than as an instructor of it I’m certain that there are many ways to get the creative juices flowing and how to release more creativity.  The one that works best for me is visualization coupled with self talk.

Visualization is so important to help yourself & others conceptualize ideas.  It’s why I always work hard to find images for my blog posts & why all of my keynote presentations are visual rather than bullet points with words.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This is a long post, so I put an executive summary here if you want to get the point without reading all the detail. If you plan to read the post you can skip the summary if you want.

• Almost all business success relies on creativity. This applies equally to VCs, startups & big company executives
• Despite the importance of creativity, there seems to be almost no focus on teaching it, encouraging it, training at it & incorporating it into our daily routines. The need for creativity extends well beyond product design.
• Many people are visual thinkers. Therefore to drive creativity people need to do visual brainstorming
• You need to find what works for you to put yourself in that environment and learn how to do “self talk,” learn how to create visual charts, learn how to test & iterate ideas and the learn how to effectively communicate results.
• For me I can only do this by myself. I think team sessions are better for testing ideas than for original thought, but that’s me. Solitude & creativity go hand-in-hand.
• I use tools to invoke my creatieve self.  One example is driving, which has an actual physiological reason it makes you creative. The key is channeling what you learn when you drive onto paper for retention purposes so you have to write it down soon afterward
• One of the books that first made me aware of the “creative brain” was “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards.  It’s a book about creating art but shows how an artist’s mind gets “into the zone,” how creativity can be invoked, and why looking at what you create in a different way than the rational mind would conceive is an important part of creativity.  She literally encourages you to draw things upside down.
• Other ways I drive creativity are time pressure, showers & occasionally wine. All are known creativity drivers and are covered in the book mentioned above.  For others they swear by music.  I personally find music more distracting than helpful.
• Adding structure to creativity is not an oxymoron. It’s how you codify your ideas
• Like anything, creativity takes practice.  There’s no such thing as “not being a creative person.”  Some people are more creative than others but it’s within us all.  You just have to dedicate yourself to a wanting to tap your creative juices.
• I apply visual thinking for nearly everything I do: preparing for important phone calls (I imagine my opening lines, I imagine the responses), writing keynote presentations, deciding whether or not to invest in a company, preparing for board meetings – you name it.  These are all creative processes.
• Visualization is a well known technique in professional sports where the difference between winning & losing is often psychological more than physical.  If it can work for them, it can work for you.

THE DETAILS

What exactly is visualization? – It is exactly as it sounds.  The process of visualization is literally imagining or seeing things in your mind.  When I need to give a speech and I’m writing a slide for my deck, I think up the story in my mind that I’m going to tell for this slide.  I literally imagine myself on stage saying the words.  I think about how the audience might react and whether if I were in the audience I would be intrigued.

It’s why before every speech I call the organizer and drill them about who will be in the audience.  I want to know how many people, their level of tech sophistication, their age and their interests.  I look carefully at who is speaking before me.  In order to visualize how an audience will receive my presentation I have to be able to imagine the whole situation.

When I write a blog post I often see the words before I write them.  If I know I have a topic I’m interested in writing about many times I’ll literally think whole sentences in my mind as a test drive before I ever sit at the computer and type.

Strange, I know.  But for many people the most important driver of innovation is this kind of visualization & self talk.  Yet it almost sounds too strange or mystical and as a result I seldom hear leaders talk about it.  So I thought I would.

Creativity in our business lives – The average tech startup these days spends time talking with colleagues & investors about a multitude of things: customer acquisition, viral adoption, raising capital, hiring / firing employees, product features, technology trends, marketing / branding, and on and on.  I hear very little discussion ever about how to be more creative.

It’s ironic because I believe creativity is the most important success criterion for a startup.  And if we’re reflective, it’s also one of the most important success criteria for investors, senior executives, tech writers and virtually anybody involved in business leadership.  Yet most startups seem to constrain creativity to product design.  That’s a shame.

Creativity is what helps us think of our ideas in the first place.  It’s what helps us imagine what feature sets would be most appealing.  It’s how we package our company story and drive our press coverage.  As a VC it’s how I think through which markets will be attractive in the future, which ones I want to be in now and how the technology & business world will likely evolve.  Without creativity I’d simply invest in the trends I’m seeing on TechCrunch which I inherently believe means I would be investing in what has already happend rather than imagining what could be.

When I make important phone calls I literally play out the start of the call in my mind’s eye before I ever pick up the phone.  I imagine myself saying my opening line and put myself in the shoes of the receiver to think about how they’ll react.

There is not a single important business function I do that doesn’t involve creativity.  And whether I’m preparing to attend a board meeting, I’m planning to lead a strategic discussion with an executive team, or whether I’m preparing for a TV interview – I use the same process.

The creative process - Whenever I need to do any task that requires insight I have to be able to visualize – to literally SEE the decision framework.  Many people are visual thinkers.  I often start with a blank piece of paper & a pen and start doodling. I try to visually deconstruct the problem with boxes, arrows, circles & other shapes.  I add words & ideas.  I try to figure out the structure of the component parts.  I start to build in metaphors for what I’m thinking about.  I roll up metaphors into a narrative or theme that has coherence.

I know this sounds abstract so let me give you an example from this week.

I recently invested in a company in the media & entertainment sector (this will be announced in a couple of months) so I’ve been thinking a lot about how the industry works, why the structure has evolved the way it did, why the company I invested in has had so much success and what this all implies for the future.  I had to do all of this in order to get comfortable that the company had a scalable & sustainable advantage and to think through the threats I thought they would encounter.

I started to build this into a media & entertainment value chain that broke down the components of the industry into discrete parts.  I put my definitions on them because I didn’t want my thinking to be constrained by industry-defined boundaries or definitions.  From left to right I wrote in boxes: talent discovery, content development, production, post-production, distribution, & marketing.  Underpinning it all I wrote: sales, asset management, analytics & talent management.

I used these boxes to imagine what existing film, tv, radio & print media companies did in each of these areas.  Were they vertically integrated?  If so, why?  Did they dominate one or two areas?  How did they come to do so?  Why do cable & satellite companies force us to take content “bundles” that cost more than we want and have content we don’t watch.  Why?  Who else is complicit and equally bound by The Innovator’s Dilemma?  Will this hold in the future?

Where do the new entrants like YouTube, Pandora, iTunes, Huffington Post, Boxee, Netflix, Demand Media and other disruptive offerings fit into that equation and how is it changing?  How much power does Google have due to search? How does social media on Facebook & Twitter change things?

If the past required us to watch in a linear, time-based TV show that favored a grid-like TV Guide or electronic programming guides (EPGs), how will we find & discover content in the world of over-abundance? Can the market support new entrants like Clicker or will it favor the old guard like Rovi?  If this appointment television had a 22-minute structure, is there a reason to expect that time allotment in the future? Why?

I wrote my initial conclusions in a post on The Future of Television & The Digital Living Room.  If you read the post you’ll literally see the dissection of the topic in the way I saw it in my head.

But as I contemplate the future world I asked myself this new set of questions and I literally thought about each topic in my head and I scribbled notes onto my page.  I moved the boxes around, I changed where the arrows went, I drew bullet points underneath each box.  I rewrote the page 7-10 times.  Writing it & re-writing it is not a problem – it is part of the creative process for me.

By having thought through the issues I can now begin the process of talking with industry people about this topic and why it works how it works.  I can ask for feedback in a focused way rather than a vague way.  ”In which situations do you start with talent and built content that matches their talents and in which situation do you write the storyline first?” My framework gives me a deeper understanding of the sector.

Creativity & structure are not mutually exclusive – We associate creativity with the right side of our brain and logic or structure with the left side of our brains.  So having structure with creativity sounds like an oxymoron.  It is not.  In every brainstorming session I have (with myself) I start by scribbling down ideas in a rapid, free form way and then I look for structure.  As I already spoke about, when I do it with paper I often draw shapes, words, lines & bullet points and then think out loud in my head with self talk to think about how they’re connected.

I have a process I use for blog posts, too.  The ideas themselves almost always come from an idea I had in discussions with others as part of my daily working life.  I then mull them over in my head when I’m jogging, when I’m driving or when I’m laying in bed.  I visualize the blog title and think about whether it will be impactful.  I often start thinking about sentences and constructing them in my head.  I think about what the key points are.

From there I add the title into WordPress. I probably have about 30 blog titles tee’d up to write for any day that I sit down.  I never really come to WordPress and think, “what should I write about today?”  Either it’s a thought I’ve had and have to get out of my head, or something I’m reacting to because I read a post that I want to respond to or – as is usually the case – I look through my titles and think, “which one am I passionate about today?”

And here’s where the formal structure comes in.  I almost always break up my post into sections before I write.  Just as in this post, I thought about the structure before letting the words flow out of my head and on to the screen. I organize the components of the topic, I write the section headings, I think about them each as individual titles, I think about whether the order flows and whether the overall narrative holds.

In a way, I’ve written the whole thing before a detailed word comes out of my head.  Then it’s just a function of writing each section, re-reading to test for flow, attempting to edit a bit and then hit publish.

I then think visually about the post.  I imagine people reading it.  I wonder whether it will make an impact.  If I think I’ve missed the mark I either delay publishing it or I rewrite sections.  Or – like today – I decide it’s too long for most readers but I still want to get all my thoughts out so I decide to add an executive summary for those with less time or interest.

But to be clear – it is structure that underpins my creative process.  Always.  Free form, then aggregation, then organization, then structure, then words, then metaphors, then narrative, then publish.  I becomes predictable and repeatable.

The importance of solitude – I don’t believe in group creativity.  I understand that some people do.  They work well with a facilitator and they learn from hearing other people’s ideas.  Not me.  I really need a quite space, a blank canvass, a pen or keyboard, an objective, and enough time for ideas to flow.  In a group if I have a creative spark I have no time for it to marinate as other people begin speaking.

To be clear – V1 of my ideas are never the best I can do.  Once I have my ideas I then like to bring them to a public setting and take them for a test drive.  Debate is one of the most important ingredients in innovation.  But I like to show up to the debate with my “strawman” ideas rather than thinking about a topic for the first time.  It all starts on my own.

Time pressure & creativity - I’ve written about “The Urgency Addiction” before.  The premise is that many people focus on stuff that’s urgent & important when we should really focus on what’s not urgent & important.  But people like me thrive on urgency.  For whatever reason it’s what gets my creative juices going.  I think that without a deadline my mind wanders too much on other tasks.  Knowing that I’m doing a speech in the morning in front of 200 people has a funny way of focusing my mind the night before if I haven’t finished my deck.  I have a high fear of failure that acts as my safety net.

In the urgency post I talked about creating artificial deadlines that get you to dig into the same creative urgency while giving yourself a buffer to refine your ideas.  I spoke at the NextGen conference last week to a large audience.  It was on a Wednesday and I was traveling to be there.  I knew I’d have 7 other meetings the day before so I told myself that I HAD to finish the deck on Sunday night to avoid pulling an all-nighter on Tuesday and getting myself sick.  And that did the trick.

I decided the topic – “All the things I effed up at my first company.”  It was a conference for mostly college undergraduate students or recent graduates.  First time wantrepreneurs.  So I thought this would be a good topic.  I then took 20 blank Powerpoint pages.  I brainstormed the things I had messed up and wrote a title for each: raised too much money, wasn’t passionate about the industry, hired too senior of people, built too many products & over spec’d them, internationalized too early, etc.

Next, I imagined a story I would tell for each topic and what image would represent that story.  I spent time on istockphoto and Google Images getting the images just right.  And in 2 hours I was done.  I woke up early the day of the presentation and I practiced the stories in my head.  I did self talk.  I visualized whether the story would be well received.  I tweaked a couple of titles and changed 2 pictures that didn’t sit right with me.  And then done.  If you’re interested the deck is here.

Things I Effed Up at my First Company

Invoking the creative brain – Have you ever noticed that you have more creative thoughts when you’re on a long drive?  For years I felt this and never understood why until I read “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” a book by Betty Edwards that talks about the creative process in art.  When you drive you’re forced to deal with 3D visual stimulation coming at you in a continual stream.  Your brain has to process this information and the process of dealing with all of this visual stimulus forces you into “right brain thinking” and when you’re in that zone you’re tapping into your creative potential.

Apparently what artists do when they sit at their canvass or when they record songs is get into this right-brain creative zone.  Artists often have more right-brain thinkings skills and so it comes more naturally.  For us left-brain thinkers we need to find ways to get into the zone.  When I’m in a creative zone I literally feel like an artist at work.

When I start scribbling on paper and am able to “see” solutions to problems or outline industry structures I feel “in the zone” and what I’ve learned over the years is that I need to have the right environment and stimuli.  That’s why I talk about the importance of being alone, my need for silence, having blank paper for scribbling notes furiously, applying time pressure and forcing myself to do unconstrained writing, which can be organized into patterns when I have a chance to read it later.

In addition to driving Ms. Edwards talks about the other natural activity that invokes creativity – taking a shower.  I’m sure you’ve noticed you’ve had creative thoughts in the shower before.  Be open to it.  I also get into the zone when I’m running and occasionally after a glass of wine.

One of the most interesting more recent things I’ve noticed lately is that Guitar Hero has the same impact on me as driving.  I’m forced to look at colors dropping rapidly on my TV and I have to hit the keys on my plastic guitar in rapid sequence.  There’s no way to deal with the falling colors logically so you literally start to “feel” the notes dropping and your fingers start to respond to your visual stimulus without rational thought.  This is the best way I can describe “the zone” to anyone who doesn’t regularly experience it.

Reworking human interactions back into your creative design – I’ve talked a lot about my need to be creative on my own but as we all know it’s the power of human interactions that improves our thinking.  For me it’s just a question of when I bring other people into my process.  My first ideas never survive contact with others.  I’ll walk my model around several smart & informed people on any topic.  I’ll practice my arguments and hear how they respond.

Sometimes it is by presenting to my colleagues and debating.  Sometimes it is by speaking at a conference in the way that comedians test drive their material at small venues before taking their shows on the road.  They use audience reactions to refine their craft.  I also feed off of the energy of others.  My ideas morph the way your products do when you test them with customers and watch how they use them.

Being creative in an ADD world - Sitting at your computer can often detract from creativity, which is why I often do it with paper & pen and in a room with no computer.  The problem I have on the computer is that there are always distractions to pull me away from my brainstorming.  I look up at the tabs in Chrome and see that there are two new @ messages to me in Twitter.  Somebody IM’s me in Gmail.  I feel like looking at the headlines on NYTimes.  I hear a bell ring in Outlook telling me, “you’ve got mail!”

I handle this in three ways.  Really important innovative thinking I do with pen & paper.  If I need to innovate on my computer I try to turn off all my external stimuli (e.g. close email) so I can stay focused. Or if I’m struggling to get into the flow I take an ADD distraction break over on email or Twitter and come back to my brainstorming session 20 minutes later.

Summary / Putting it Into Action:

• Allocate enough time in your weekly routine for “being creative”
• Find ways to invoke your creativity (driving, shower, wine, music) and learn what your best environment is (quite vs. music, alone vs. group)
• Develop & refine a process. It might be similar to mine: write, organize, shape, move objects, add bullet points, develop stories, etc. Or your process might be different.  But you need a process for innovation.  It doesn’t just happen.
• Test your ideas with others, seek feedback, refine.
• Have fun.  That’s what the creative process is supposed to be.
CrunchBase Information
Mark Suster
Information provided by CrunchBase

Sobees has made a business of creating innovative social media clients, particularly focusing on bringing Twitter, Facebook and social search to the a variety of platforms. Today, the developer is getting into the news business with the launch of NewsMix, an iPad app which presents news and content shared by your social circle in a magazine format on the device.

The app, which costs $2.99 in the App Store, allows you to create and mix a digital magazine composed of content shared in your Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds (Google
Reader and feed search). The app will categorize content in a magazine or show news in a separate timeline format for Facebook and Twitter. And you can view photos and videos in separate sections.

In terms of social capabilities, the app allows you to comment and like Facebook posts directly from the magazine, and you can share articles on both Twitter and Facebook simultaneously. The App also allows you to email content and send articles to Instapaper.

Sobees founder Francois Bochatay says that the app contains the startup’s proprietary curation technology, which will will automatically prioritize and curate Twitter and Facebook posts based on your interactions with the app.

Of course, NewsMix sounds very similar to the enormously popular iPad app Flipboard, which also curates articles and images from your social streams like Twitter and Facebook, and presents them in a magazine-like format. Pulse also plays in the space as well.

Apple can do a lot of things, but it can’t push through a new video standard. All of this iPad 2 speculation – that the new iPad will have a Retina display to show 2048×1536 content, a considerable step up from the 1024×768 of the previous iPad – is pretty much a pipe dream. Perhaps you’ll have a slightly higher resolution display this year, but forget about a Retina display.

Why? Because there’s no content that will look good on it. Jack Deneut writes:

Forget about DVD (Standard Definition) video, which if displayed at native resolution would be little bigger than a postage stamp on this new display. 720p HD video (the highest resolution sold on iTunes) would fill only a quarter of the screen, and 1080p video would have black bars not only along the top and bottom, but also along the sides of the screen. Of course, Apple will scale up these videos to fill the screen, but most people don’t expect pixel-doubling when watching HD video.

Read more…

One of the biggest misconceptions about the European tech scene is that it should operate exactly like the Silicon Valley tech scene. This is just plain dunderheaded. The truth – far too too seldom stated – is that as well as operating in a ‘Valley’ manner, equally European startups can come out of a sector-specific business context. Thus, music startups like Last.FM, Songkick and others have continued to emerge from London and Berlin where the music and creative scene in Europe is hugely strong. London is also becoming a center for fashion startups like Editd and Garmz. In that same vein, London is a big financial centre.

To that end today OpenGamma is a new kind of financial startup, based in London, which has an open source analytics and risk management platform for the financial services industry. Today it’s completed a $6 million Series B round of equity financing led by FirstMark Capital, a New York-based VC. Accel Partners joins the round as a return investor. OpenGamma previously had a Series A round of $6m from Accel Partners.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has just announced that he is taking a medical leave of absence according to a release issued by the company today. Here’s the email memo Jobs sent to Apple employees today.

Team,

At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for all of Apple's day to day operations. I have great confidence that Tim and the rest of the executive management team will do a terrific job executing the exciting plans we have in place for 2011.

I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, my family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy.

Steve

While it’s unclear what the reason is for the medical leave, Jobs’ previous medical history includes Pancreatic cancer as well as a liver transplant. In 2004, Jobs contracted Pancreatic Cancer, which he beat. Then Jobs underwent a liver transplant in 2009, and also made a full recovery. During Jobs’ absence in 2009, COO Tim Cook took over Apple’s day-to-day activities, similar to this situation.

We may hear more about Jobs health condition tomorrow, when Apple releases Q4 and 2010 earnings.

Clearly Jobs is a survivor; and has fought hard against his medical battles. It’s safe to assume that he’s going to conquer this one as well.

Get well soon Steve!

There’s certainly no shortage of services offering to help people connect online for professional reasons, and as of recently we can add eBackers to that particular line-up.

Dubbed a request board for savvy web workers, aims to become a place where web professionals, online businesses, startups and people with ideas gather on the Web, whether for securing funding, partnerships or merely advice.

Currently, the board consists of a website owner looking for an iPhone app developer, the founder of an online video startup looking for a partner, and the like.

eBackers is completely free and was founded by Marco Massaro, previously owner of Audiolizer.com, a streaming music service.

Alternatives include PartnerUp, Build It With Me, Entrepreneur.com and Kickstarter.

Sones, developer of the GraphDB graph database, has raised a 'couple of millions' of euros to expand its cloud computing business and open source community. Investors include KfW Bankengruppe, the early stage venture capital fund of Saxony, and T-Venture, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom. Back in 2008, sones had already landed an undisclosed amount of seed capital from T-Venture. GraphDB supplements traditional relational databases and is currently available as a scalable cloud solution from Microsoft Azure and the Amazon Cloud. Basically, the technology is designed to bring together and link data from various SQL databases, enabling entirely new business applications.

Andrew Mason, founder and CEO of social commerce sensation Groupon, has apologized to Japanese customers in a video today. If you’ve been following Groupon with eagle eyes, like we have, you’ll know that this is in relation to a New Year’s deal that went horribly wrong.

Mason is renowned for his great sense of humor, but in this video he shows his serious side.

In a message to Groupon’s Japanese customers, spoken in English but subtitled in Japanese, Mason acknowledges that the company had “really messed up” the deal in question and outlined steps it was taking to rebuild its image in Japan, and beyond.

Mason says they’d successfully featured the food delivery business of Bird Café in the past, but that the Japanese restaurant was unable to process the volume of orders for a New Year’s deal after Groupon sold 500 coupons for an "osechi" meal. Many dishes were delivered too late, while others were in “terrible condition”, Mason acknowledges.

Kenji Mizuguchi, the president of Bird Café, stepped down a few weeks ago as a result of the widely-publicized snafu, while Groupon reimbursed customers, apologized for the mishap and handed out vouchers to restore its image.

In the video, embedded below, the founder of Groupon goes on to say that the company will not let mistakes like this happen in the future.

Groupon has started educating its customers on ‘capacity planning’ to avoid problems like these to occur in all new countries it operates in, he adds.

Missteps like this of course highlight the difficulties Groupon faces, and will face in the future, as it tries to manage its rapid global expansion.

On a sidenote: if you’re a business owner, please take a look at this video and learn a lesson or two on how to genuinely apologize to customers when you screw up – and you will, repeatedly. It’s invaluable. Sorry if I seem like a Mason fanboy, but he just gets it right a lot.

(Via Hacker News)

Travelmatch.co.uk has officially launched a new travel search engine, enabling people to search for holidays based on requirements rather than the usual criteria such as destination, date, cost and period of stay. The site has been in development for a looooong time - since 2006 - and was funded in 2010 by Lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman and other investors including David Scowsill, former CEO of Opodo, and John Moulton, founder of Better Capital.

iVideosongs, an online music instruction service that shows how to play songs from original artists who wrote and performed them, launched at the DEMO conference in 2008 and raised a total of $3.3 million from private investors. Its assets have now been unceremoniously acquired by a recently established music education and entertainment studio called Songmaster Studios Education.

Songmaster purchased all of iVideosongs’ video lessons and its usage rights, as well as its royalty agreements with dozens of artists, songwriters and publishers.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Songmaster says it will continue to promote the iVideosongs trademark and distribute its video catalog, while developing new educational programs that incorporate iVideosongs lessons and other educational methods and materials.

iVideosongs was co-founded by Andy Morton and Grammy-nominated musician Tim Huffman.

One of the standout scenes at in The Social Network happens in the first five minutes of the movie. Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) is sitting in a bar with boyfriend Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) when she says the following to him:

You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.

It basically sets the tone for the entire film. And it’s also undoubtedly one of the many scenes that made Facebook (the actual company) uneasy over the film. Well tonight, after ringing up a number of the major awards at The Golden Globes, writer Aaron Sorkin took a moment in his best screenplay acceptance speech to acknowledge the real Mark Zuckerberg and that very scene.

“I wanted to say to Mark Zuckerberg, if you’re watching tonight, Rooney Mara’s character makes a prediction at the beginning of the movie, she was wrong. You turned out to be a great entrepreneur, a visionary and an altruist,” Sorkin said on stage.

Later, while accepting the award for Best Picture of the year, producer Scott Rudin, had the following to say: “I want to thank everybody at Facebook; Mark Zuckerberg for his willingness to allow us to use his life and work as a metaphor through which to tell a story about communication and the way we relate to each other.”

This is, of course, at odds with the reports of the company’s decided unwillingness to see this movie made.

Sorkin also used a part of his speech to address to the charges that the film is misogynistic. “And I want to thank all the female nominees tonight for helping demonstrate to my young daughter that elite is not a bad word, it’s a an aspirational one. Honey, look around, smart girls have more fun, and honey, you’re one of them, I love you,” he said.

It seems like ages ago that we first heard that Hollywood would be making a movie based on the founding of Facebook. At the time, the entire thing seemed like a bit of a joke. Then Aaron Sorkin signed on to write it. Then David Fincher signed on to direct it. Then Trent Reznor signed on to score it. The end result?  Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Score, and Best Picture at the Golden Globes. And Oscar gold is likely to follow next.

It was perhaps Reznor who nailed what the ultimate reaction to the film would be. “It's really fucking good. And dark!,” he wrote in July of last year. Indeed. Of course, he’s not as quick to praise Zuckerberg.

After being nominated for a number of awards at this year’s Golden Globe awards ceremony, ‘The Social Network’ nabbed Best Picture (in the drama category), Screenplay (Aaron Sorkin), Score (Trent Reznor), and Director (David Fincher).

Those are all significant categories for the awards ceremony, with the movie garnering more awards from the Hollywood Foreign Press than most of the films nominated this year. Interestingly, Sorkin and the film’s producer Scott Rudin both thanked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in their acceptance speeches.

The movie had a fairly good Box Office run and received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics.

The Golden Globes are known as an accurate reflection of what could come at the Oscars, so this is a big win for the movie, which was released by Sony Pictures. We’ll learn on January 25 if the movie will grab any Academy Award nominations

You can read our review of the movie here.

More: Awards In Hand, The Social Network Filmmakers Heap Praise On Zuckerberg

Photo Credit/IMDB

Blog fights happen. Sometimes for attention, but most of the time because someone is really pissed off about something. And don’t count out big media, they jump right in too when they feel it.

No one’s ever written down any rules for blog fights that I know of. But there are some unspoken rules and guidelines.

Here are a few core strategies:

• Only start a fight if you really believe in what you’re saying. Don’t start a fight just because you’re bored. It’s pointless. There needs to be an issue you really care about. The back and forth will help the truth get out.
• Be direct and be clear. Have a position that you believe in. The world is black and white. If you see lots of grey, stay on the sidelines.
• Generally you don’t start a fight with a smaller site unless they’ve done something really egregious. Fight up the food chain. Conversely, you have to ignore the countless jabs you take from the small guys. They’re just trying to get attention, or they have no idea what they’re talking about, or they’re just plain crazy.
• Don’t engage in French-style military strategy by going half way and then surrendering. Robert Scoble does this all the time. He picks a fight and then he backs off completely when he takes return fire. If he didn’t feel strongly enough about the issue to begin with, there was no reason to jump in.
• Most importantly, don’t just engage in fights you know you’ll win. You’re doing this to fight for what you think is right or correct, not score points. Sure, I take the easy wins when they’re handed to me, but I try not to take cheap shots even then. And I often engage in fights that I know I’m going to lose because I care about the topic. And I always know if I’m going to win or not before I even post. See Blogging And Mass Psychomanipulation.
• In summary, don’t pander to the crowd. It’s pointless. If they love you they’ll hate you tomorrow anyway, and vice versa. Write what you believe and your head will stay in a good place.

That’s not it though. There are also unspoken rules of engagement. An ethical guide to a clean blog fight, if you will.

Last week I threw a few punches at Engadget, our sister site at AOL. They’ve been on our ass for a couple of years now. They have a major attribution problem, for example, and tend to just steal stories. They also get extremely petty, as evidenced by how they covered the CrunchPad story. More recently Engadget editor in chief Joshua Topolsky tried to kill our acquisition by AOL. And for some strange reason Engadget writers and editors tend to troll our comments pointlessly.

All of these things are facts. It’s a big pile of petty. I was going to let this all go, but now the NY Times says they’re going to write a story about the fight and want my comments.

After our acquisition by AOL I tried to bury the hatchet with them. I put on my big boy pants and I went out of my way to link to them, retweet them and generally say the past is the past. I suggested we work together on an internal call. We even invited them to participate in the Crunchies. Dead silence on their end, and the trolling continued.

So I took my shot. And then they fired back.

Not directly, though. They spoke off record to another blog. They denied ever doing anything to poke at us. They released parts of private emails out of context. Worst of all they brought “civilians” (non bloggers) into the fight. Etc.

In other words, Engadget is really good at being passive aggressive, but they really suck at a good clean blog fight. So here are some suggestions for the next time they find themselves in the middle of some mess they started. Basically this comes down to fighting your own battles, not using human shields, and generally making sure to play by some basic ethical rules so that when the fight is over, you can move on.

• Fight directly under your own byline. If you want to respond, respond directly. Don’t hide under off record comments. Don’t want to use Engadget for the fight? No problem. You have your own blog and other choices. But blathering off record is just cowardly. See this Kevin Marks tweet (he’s often very critical of me) to understand what I’m saying.
• Don’t lie. Just because the other side isn’t going to post proof of your actions doesn’t mean you should feel free to just deny actual facts. If you’re embarrassed of your behavior, that should be a sign that you’re in the wrong. Josh says he didn’t try to kill the AOL deal out of spite. He, I and a few other people know that’s not true.
• Don’t bring civilians into the fight. In this case they trashed Heather Harde, our CEO. Heather has built quite a business out of TechCrunch over the last few years. She is one of the most effective executives and kindest people I know, and doesn’t deserve to become collateral damage in a blog fight. Also, the stuff they said about her isn’t actually true. Engadget also trashed AOL management, suggesting they were incompetent for not controlling me. That’s a weak counter argument.
• Don’t pretend you’re more important than you are. Engadget made a big deal out of how big they are compared to us, how little we matter, etc. The truth is this. We did $10 million in revenue in 2010 (previously reported). They did all of $11 million, from what I hear (I don’t have access to their data, this is sourced). If Heather ran Engadget, she could get their revenue to $30 million or more in 18 months, based on our model and their page views.
• In our big fight with the NY Times last year there was lots of communication in the background, and that helped contain the battle. Remember at the end of the fight we have to go on with our lives. That means there are certain places you don’t go in a fight. You don’t publish private emails, particularly just parts of them and out of context. Being able to communicate directly, even while fighting, is what keeps things civil. Once you break that trust, it’s gone forever. Engadget did exactly that. And now all email communication between us and the rest of our business unit has effectively ceased.

To sum up this section – if someone starts a knife fight with you, then walk away or pull out a knife and fight. Don’t just hire someone else to show up with a gun and call it a win. Truth matters. How you fight matters. Whether you win or lose is far less important.

That’s all I’m going to say about this particular fight for now. Hope this helped people understand how we approach these things, and what kind of behavior we expect from the other side.

After four weeks of civil unrest, the fall of the Tunisian president Ben Ali played out for all the world on Twitter this Friday, some dubbing it a “Twitter Revolution” like the election protests in Iran and Moldovia. Increasingly, collective events from TV shows to the World Cup to #lessambitiousmovies to the fall of dictatorships cause spikes in related conversation on the microblogging network which, with its broad media influencer adoption, has become the world’s eminent news amplifier.

Christopher Golda of Backtype (which does Twitter analysis) provided us with snapshot of Tunisa mentions on Friday January 14th. Not surprisingly the hashtag peaked at 28 tweets per second at 21:27:56 Tunisian time (20:27:56 GMT, 12:27:56 PT), a couple hours after the first reports that Tunisan president had left the country at around 9:30 PT. At the end of the cycle, total tweets mentioning Tunisia (including those using the #Tunisia hastag) were over 196K. Total tweets for #sidibouzid (the province where the protests started) were over 103K.

The total number of people mentioning Tunisia in tweets was over 50K, which was less than the 81K boasted by the recent #Lessambitious movies Twitter trend. Golda says this is probably because the latter was “more engaging, more participatory.”

According to Backtype, the top ten Tunisian related tweets were:

It’s interesting to note that only three of the top tweets are from a mainstream media source (only one from the US), four (including @alfarhan’s) are breaking the news of Ben Ali’s departure and two are breaking the news of the dissolution of Parliament. The most retweeted account, @VoiceofTunisa with its 496 followers, was retweeted over 400 times.

The top sites being shared on Twitter relating to Tunisia were:

1. facebook.com
2. bbc.co.uk
3. guardian.co.uk
4. youtube.com
5. english.aljazeera.net
6. liveword.ca
7. nytimes.com
8. cnn.com
9. twitpic.com
10. news.yahoo.com

The fact that Facebook, like Twitter, sees an increase of activity around times of political change and facilitated communication between activists this time around explains its appearance at the top of the leaderboard here. More active international media like the Guardian, the BBC and Al Jazeera round out the top five. The first US-based traditional media source, The New York Times comes after the Liveword.ca blog at number seven.

Since we spend so much time on the sites ourselves, there is a tendency for bloggers and reporters to be myopic when it comes to the use of Twitter in mediating significant events. Because news about Tunisia saturated our Twitter streams, it can seem like Twitter played a crucial role in instigating the news itself.

And while the jury is still out on just how much tweets can influence something as monumental as the fall of a government, it is worth noting that the critical mass of Tunisia related activity on Twitter happened after Ben Ali fled.

Word cloud: Backtype

There seem to be a lot of Yahoo properties that no one pays any attention to at all. We noted that Yahoo kept their Halloween content up past that holiday, for example. There was the Delicious snafu where a blog post saying the site wasn’t going offline was offline because the site had been taken down. Now, we’ve noticed, Yahoo’s Academy Awards site hasn’t been updated since March 2010.

This is despite the fact that Yahoo had a press push earlier this year: “Yahoo is doubling down on its awards show content this year,” says the article. It’s not just that the content has been pushed to Yahoo’s OMG site. There’s little on this year’s Academy Awards there, either.

Not a big deal. Not the end of the world. But this is a sign that there are Yahoo properties that have no staff assigned to them. Or worse, there are staff but they just don’t care at all about their jobs. And Chrysler, Yahoo’s exclusive advertising partner for the season’s awards show, must be wondering what’s going on.

The good news is that after this post Yahoo will quickly update their Oscars site. Well, tomorrow, after the weekend’s over. I mean Tuesday, after the holiday. Certainly sometime before next year.

On the face of things, I don't have a huge amount in common with Stieg Larsson. For a start I'm not Swedish; and I'm not dead. Also, in the time it took you to read those last two sentences, Stieg Larsson sold more books than I did in the whole of last year.

And yet, if Larsson were still around, I feel sure there's at least one area on which we’d agree (two if you count on the importance of training female Eritrean People’s Liberation Front guerrillas in the use of grenade launchers). And that’s the pain and frustration of trying to sell international rights to our books.

Back in 2008, Larsson was already a big success in his native Sweden. His debut novel, published in 2005, had already sold three million copies: a number made all the more impressive (or understandable, depending on your point of view) by the fact that he'd died the previous year. And yet despite this local acclaim – including several movie adaptations – the wider world remained blissfully unaware of his work.

Not that his publisher wasn't doing its best to spread the word globally; it's just that no-one outside the Nordic countries gave a damn: eight US publishers, and an equal number in the UK had turned down the opportunity to translate the work. In the end it was only after film companies started showing interest in a translation of the material that the English language rights were picked up by struggling London-based indie publisher Quercus for next to nothing.

[Disclosure: back in my days as a book publisher, we shared a lead investor and founding chairman with Quercus. He is no longer involved in either company. Also: he hates me.]

After a hasty editing job, Quercus went on to sell 2.3 million copies of the three books in the first 18 months,  saving the company from bankruptcy and turning mounting losses into profits of around $5 million in 2010. US rights were subsequently bought by Knopf who have since sold over 14 million copies, including a record number of electronic copies (Larsson was the first author to achieve over one million Kindle sales).

And yet all that success makes it all the more remarkable how close Larsson's work came to never being published in the UK or the US (and missing out on maybe 20 million sales, and counting). Sixteen is a lot of publishers to be rejected by, and even Quercus' founder recently admitted they probably wouldn't have bothered buying the rights had Larsson been alive. Such is the crapshoot of international rights.

Again, I am no Stieg Larsson – but I can certainly grok how narrowly he snatched victory from the jaws of defeat (his untimely death notwithstanding). Later this year, readers in the UK, Australia, Hong Kong and almost any other country on the planet will be able to buy my new book: The Upgrade. Readers in the US: not so much.

Like Stieg Larsson's trilogy, by my reckoning The Upgrade has been turned down by eight publishers in the U.S. Larsson’s publisher was warned by one British bookseller that "people don't buy books by authors with funny names"; similarly I’ve grown accustomed to hearing the refrain from New York: "it's a little too British for American readers".

Back in 2009, I shared similar frustrations about my previous book; how despite having decent UK and International sales and a growing potential readership in the US, I'd failed dismally to find a US publisher. In the end I gave away the US edition of the book here on TechCrunch. Since then over 100,000 people have read or downloaded that edition it in its various forms.

I'll be honest, I was expecting a slightly easier ride this time. Unlike its London-centric predecessor, the new book is basically a love letter to American women America with over half of it set in this country, across six states. Given all that, surely someone would pick up the US rights this time? But no. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one failed attempt to get published in the US may be regarded as a misfortune, two looks like carelessness. Maybe it's just a crappy book.

So, what to do? Satisfy myself with the book being available everywhere except the country where I live? Perhaps. Wait patiently for an American equivalent of Quercus to come along and scoop up the rights for a pittance? Not going to happen; at least not while I remain alive.

No, surely there must be some clever technological solution to the problem? After all, technology is disrupting EVERYTHING, right?

Digital self-publishing seems an obvious avenue, especially with self-published authors like J. A. Konrath claiming five-figure monthly revenues from Kindle and iPad sales alone. I could even take a leaf – no pun intended – out of Cory Doctorow's book and self-publish in print, particularly the kind of high-value special editions which Doctorow says provide the bulk of his profits. And yet, as I've written before, self publishing holds no real appeal for me: I love having a publisher, I love having an editor and I love having a publicist and marketing department working on my behalf (Quercus spent hundreds of thousands of dollars kick-starting sales of the Millennium Trilogy, including giving away hundreds of copies to London commuters to build word of mouth.) Cory Doctorow's experiment in self-publishing has managed to produce a book that is stunningly beautiful, and has been hailed for various marketing innovations that put traditional publishers to shame. But Doctorow admits that the process has been exhausting, to the point where his health is suffering. I get a migraine just trying to complete a manuscript, without having to consider paper stock and cover art.

Similarly, giving away the book for free worked last time, but it seriously strained my relationship with my publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. It also doubtlessly dented UK and International sales, which is unfair given the financial commitment W&N has made in those areas.

So what options does that leave? After several weeks kicking the problem around in my head – oscillating between frustration and determination – I've alighted on two possible disruptive solutions. As far as I can tell, neither of them already exists.

Disruptive solution number one: An online marketplace for the disposal of unsold international rights.

The truth is I'd gladly give my US rights away for free in return for a decent royalty upside and a promise of a reasonable marketing/promotional spend – but  there's currently no place for me to advertise that fact. A platform for unsold rights – a kind of eBay for intellectual property – would solve that problem at a stroke, for me and for countless thousand other authors in my position. Authors or agents could pay a small fee to post a synopsis of their book, along with details of who has already bought the rights to other territories (a useful quality filter for publishers) and a summary of what price/guarantees they’d like in return for handing them over. Publishers looking for the next Steig Larsson could quickly scan the titles available for their territory, then snap them up for a pittance and the promise of a generous upside. Perhaps publishers could even pay a premium to view new titles before anyone else. In addition to territorial rights, the service could easily be expanded to sell rights according to media: ebook rights, print rights, even film or television rights. Given how many first time authors are choosing the self-publish electronically, the service could help successful ebook authors find print publishers for their work, and vice versa.

Disruptive solution number two: A traditional publishing / Kickstarter hybrid

Another solution would be for an established publisher to create a new hybrid imprint, aimed at giving established authors who remain unpublished in a particular market an alternative to self-publishing. What I have in mind is a blend of traditional publishing and Kickstarter. The publisher would acquire the ebook rights to a title for free, in exchange for a promise to publish and promote the book on the Kindle and iPad. Furthermore they would give a conditional commitment to publish a print edition of the title, based on a certain number of readers sign up in advance to purchase it. Again, I would gladly hand over the rights to my book for free knowing at least it would be professionally published and promoted as an ebook in the US. I would then move heaven and earth to encourage my various US-centric readerships (here on TechCrunch, on my blog, and in other publications) to commit to ordering an advance copy of a print edition. Once, say, 2000 people had made that commitment, the publisher would be obliged to print and distribute it, at very little risk to their bottom line. They would also commit to selling the print edition through Amazon and, if sales reach a certain point, through bricks and mortar book stores.

So there you go. If you're a publishing entrepreneur and you see any potential in either of those ideas, feel free to run with them – you have my eager blessing. Just promise that if you build the rights selling platform you'll let me know so I can put my own book on there. And if you're a US publisher who thinks the second idea seems appealing then give me a call and… well… I'd be happy to recommend a brilliant forthcoming title with available US rights which could help you prove the concept.

I warn you though, apart from all the American stuff, it's very British.

Asmyco, the Helsinki-based app developer / industry analysis advisory firm founded and led by a longtime Nokia manager, has just published a new report on its blog with notewrthy data on the increase in iOS downloads by device.

The company reports that more than 60 apps have been downloaded for every iOS device sold. That’s up from 10 apps downloaded for every iPhone/iPod touch in 2008, says Asmyco. So how did the firm get to that number? As the Apple App Store approaches 10 billion total downloads, App downloads are increasing at a faster rate that iTunes music downloads (of course, not all iTunes users are getting their music from iTunes).

Asmyco then determined that around 30 million Apps are currently being downloaded per day. The firm then divided the cumulative apps downloaded by the cumulative number of iOS devices sold, which includes iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches. Asmyco says that from that equation, each iOS device sold has downloaded more than 60 apps.

Of course, much of this information is subjective, considering Apple doesn’t publicly update its total number of iPhones, iPads and iPod touches very often. And as more devices are sold, more Apps will be downloaded.

But the Asymco does raise an interesting trend-App downloads are growing at an alarmingly fast rate, overtaking digital music along the way. Last fall, Asmyco reported that iOS App download were set to pass the total number of music downloads by the end of 2010. The firm says that this happened yet, but it’s coming close. And Apps will reach 10 billion downloads in less than half the time it took songs (31 vs 67 months for Apps, says Asmyco.)

In the midst of the implosion of the financial markets in 2008, True Ventures raised its second fund. Founder and partner Phil Black tells us that shortly after this raise in early 2009 (which he calls the “dark days in the financial world”), the fund’s partners were sitting at a meeting looking for innovative ways they could help jump start the tech economy. Inspired by President Obama’s 2009 inaugural address, True Ventures decided to launch their own program to encourage college students to work at early-stage startups, and to help inspire and educate the “entrepreneurs of tomorrow.”

Called the True Entrepreneurs Corps (TEC), the program places 12 undergraduate students in the fund’s early-stage portfolio companies. The internships take place during the summer in the San Francisco area and range in terms of focus, from technical coding to finance to marketing to business development. And TEC offers students a $3000 stipend for the summer.

In addition to the experience at the startups, the students also go through a weekly core curriculum from True Ventures that involves the financial components of founding and running a startup as well as guest lectures from seasoned entrepreneurs. Last summer, the intern class heard from SGN’s Shervin Pishevar, Kwedit’s Danny Shader, David Kirkpatrick and others. Students were asked to read and discuss Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work, Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness, and other relevant publications, to name a few.

After speaking to a few TEC alums, it’s easy to determine that these internships aren’t the average fetching coffee, making copies type of internships that most college students experience. Ali Shah, an engineering student at NYU, worked at video publishing site VodPod for summer and actually developed the company’s iPhone app. Shah says that after his experience at VodPod he either wants to work at an early-stage startup or start his own company following school.

Harvard student Amelia Lin worked at payments startup PayNearMe,mainly focusing on sales and marketing efforts at the company. Lin actually developed marketing cartoon videos explaining how PayNearMe’s technology works for consumers (you can see them here). SHe also helped develop the startup’s social media strategy. Like Shah, she’s inspired to work at a startup following graduation or start her own company.

What sets TEC apart is that the model is unique for venture firms, who generally offer in-house internship programs but don’t necessarily fund and coordinate internships and educational opportunities within portfolio companies.

For True Ventures, TEC, which is now accepting applications for its third summer program; is a way to pay it forward for both its portfolio startups and potential entrepreneurs and tech leaders. The benefits of the program is two fold. First, TEC offers college students a way to do substantial work at early stage startups while still being able to earn a few bucks over a summer. And True Ventures’ portfolio companies start building relationships with potential talent. Many of these startups would not be able to afford to recruit at colleges and/or compete with large companies like Google, Microsoft or even Facebook for talent.

As Black tells us, “we have a powerful platform and want to effect the startup ecosystem in a positive way.”