A year ago ReadWriteWeb published an article in defense of embargoes with an outline of how startups can effectively manage embargoes and special releases . Lately, in place of embargoes we’ve received a few requests to sign non-disclosure agreements. While this may simply be a rookie mistake made by early-stage entrepreneurs, NDAs and embargoes are completely different requests. Sending an NDA is absurd for a number of reasons. Sponsor 1. Confidentiality : You just sent a confidentiality agreement to a news outlet. Why the heck would you want a journalist to keep your secrets? Shouldn’t we be revealing the brilliance of your products and services? 2. Legality : An NDA is a legally binding agreement between two parties. As Andrew Warner of Mixergy puts it in his post ,”I’m not signing a legal document without a lawyer.” 3. Trust : In Venture Hacks’ Pitching Hacks book the author advises against presenting an NDA to VCs saying, “You might think an NDA is a barrier to entry for your competitors. Instead, it’s just a barrier to getting funded.” You likely have competitors in the space and if you’re not first to market then we’ve already seen them. An NDA is making you more difficult than your competitors. We’d rather write the story about the person who works with us than against us. Photo Credits: Marcin Wichary and See-ming Lee Discuss

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Why No One Will Sign Your NDA

The first quarter of 2010 could see a higher number of investments by venture capital firms than the fourth quarter of 2009, according to figures from new reports by the National Venture Capital Association and information and data services company ChubbyBrain . Data from a report relased by the NVCA yesterday shows that the fourth quarter of 2009 saw a growth of $1.7 billion in venture funds over the previous quarter, similar to numbers seen from Q4 2008 to Q1 2009. Data released today by ChubbyBrain shows that following the earlier growth in venture funds, Q2 2009 saw a $1.4 billion increase in VC investments, a trend that could mean big bucks for startups in the first quarter of 2010. Sponsor As we reported last week , 2009 was a difficult year for startups and venture capital firms, with venture-backed mergers and acquisitions continuing a downward trend in 2009. Carolynn Duncan, founder and director of the startup incubator Portland Ten , says that the “pressure crunch” of 2009 caused VCs to give prospective startups more than the third degree. “It was more like the fifth degree,” Duncan told ReadWriteWeb. “It was so intense, even for the companies showing great traction and that had bootstrapped the hell out of their project.” Duncan believes that as the new year kicks off VCs that raised funds at the end of 2009 will be looking at a new class of startups to invest in. When asked if 2010 would be an easier year to find funding, Duncan was hesitant, but optimistic. “I don’t think ‘easier’ is the right word, maybe just not as demanding,” she said. “People are just glad its 2010 and not 2009 anymore.” Photo by Flickr user borman818 . Discuss

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New Year’s Resolution? VCs Could Spend More In 2010

When we wrote our year end posts for 2009, we should’ve added patent trolling to our

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Software Patents: Should the Burden of Proof Be on the Accuser?

For young budding entrepreneurs approaching graduation this spring, or for those looking to go back for a post-graduate degree, finding the right program for your needs is very important. In their seventh annual joint effort last fall, Entrepreneur Magazine and The Princeton Review teamed up to rank the top 25 undergraduate and graduate entrepreneurship programs in the United States. Only six programs managed to make the top 10 in both lists, securing their spots at the top of the best overall entrepreneurship programs. Sponsor #1. Babson College – Babson Park, MA Finding themselves in the top spot of both top 25 lists is the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship at the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College . Babson’s entrepreneurial programs boast the largest enrollment by far of any of the top schools with over 3,300 total enrolled students, and offers undergraduates a total of over $300,000 in scholarships. #2. Drexel University – Philadelphia, PA Drexel’s undergraduate program of the Laurence A. Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship is rated sixth best, but the university’s third-ranked graduate program at the Bennett S. LeBow College of Business has boosted them into the number two spot overall. Drexel offers the most money in scholarships out of the top six, providing $350,000 for both undergraduate and graduate students, and claims that 100% of their faculty are entrepreneurs themselves. #3 (Tie). University of Arizona – Tucson, AZ The entrepreneurial programs at the University of Arizona are the most exclusive clubs on this list, enrolling just 100 undergrads and 50 graduate students in it’s McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship at the Eller College of Management . With $120,000 available in scholarships and low enrollment figures, entrepreneurs at Arizona have an excellent chance at receiving financial aid. #3 (Tie). Temple University – Philadelphia, PA

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Top 6 Colleges with Entrepreneurial Programs

With the first week of 2010 in the books, we thought we would take a look at the most popular posts of the new year in ReadWriteStart – our channel devoted to entrepreneurs. In this ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup, we’ve got tips for funding advice , keeping organized and building loyal communities , but be sure to check out the newest post in our new series “Never Mind the Valley,” highlighting thriving startup communities outside of Silicon Valley. Sponsor 5 Web Apps To Keep Your Startup Organized In a world where emails, phone calls, texts, and Tweets constantly bombard us, it is getting harder and harder to manage the firehose of data and information being thrust our way. For young companies to succeed this environment, it is imparitive they become organized and efficient lest they fall behind and quickly become overwhelmed. While there is no shortage of online solutions, it can be hard to know which one is the right tool for the job, so here’s a list of five web applications to help kick-start your company and keep it organized without breaking the bank. 5 Great Blogs For Funding Advice The best advice we can give you is to know your audience. You don’t try to sell booze to pregnant women, you don’t make God-jokes in Utah and you don’t get a term sheet without tailoring your pitch. Investors are already blogging about what they want from potential portfolio companies, so if you’re looking for funding you should be reading their blogs. While we know there are plenty of useful investment-related blogs, here’s a list of five to get you started. Community First: How Wufoo Created a Captive Audience So you’ve got a fabulous idea for a startup? That’s great, but before you get wide-eyed and start thinking about wireframes, venture capital and moving to San Francisco, get your feet wet first by beginning to build your community. Having a strong and loyal community behind you is an important step in the startup process. After all, it will be much easier to convince a potential investor of the viability of your product if there is a thriving community eager to get their hands on it. Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Los Angeles Best known for its movie stars, sun and surf, Los Angeles probably isn’t the first place you’d think to breed technology. But when you consider the influence of investors like Jason Calacanis and Mark Suster, in addition to the fact that companies like

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ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup

Today’s startups, entrepreneurs and investors live and die by what seem like a series of holy proverbs. “Release early, release often” is perhaps one of the most poignant phrases when considering product launch and feature scope. On this cold Saturday, we’re paying homage to the origins of the concept by recognizing one of the seminal works in programming philosophy, and looking at a recent startup that’s taken it to heart. Sponsor In the late nineties Eric S. Raymond presented The Cathedral and the Bazaar convincing Netscape to publish open source code. The work’s premises “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” and “release early, release often” were meant to justify early releases and crowdsourcing community feedback. While his work originally made a case for open source releases, it has gone on to inspire many outside of the open source realm. Lead by Micah Baldwin, TechStars’ comic platform Graphic.ly is launching its beta version under the “release early, release often” tenet. Said Baldwin in a recent blog post , “If we are truly going to get the community involved, we need them involved early and often. We need them now.” ReadWriteWeb first covered the mobile comic platform in November under its original name, TakeComics . Since then the company has rebranded as Graphic.ly, announced raising a little over a million dollars from Starz Media and appointed Baldwin as CEO. As a serial entrepreneur, Baldwin rationalizes his company’s early release saying, “So many young entrepreneurs get stuck in the ‘What if’ world and try to release the perfect app. At Graphic.ly, we just released our Baby Beta, which frankly sucked. Badly. But we are getting amazing feedback, and its clear that it will be such a better product in the long term.” Baldwin is using a combination of GetSatisfaction and Zendesk to manage early-stage feedback. Graphic.ly is also looking to adapt products like Google Moderator for proactive feedback in order to engage community members in the engineering and product discussions. When asked about possible outcomes for the release, Baldwin replied, “The worst case scenario is that we don’t engage our community properly and lose their trust. There is nothing more dire than lost trust. The best case is that everyone who uses Graphic.ly sees their fingerprints all over it and shows it to their friends proudly, saying ‘I built that. That’s something I did.’” The service’s first batch of invites got out tonight, to register for the service fill out the form here . Discuss

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How the Cathedral and the Bazaar Is Shaping the Future of Comics

We recently told you about 5 Great Blogs For Funding Advice , and now we wanted to remind you about a resource that can get you advice straight from the horse’s mouth: Larry Cheng’s extensive list of 131 top blogs from venture capitalists and firms – a priceless tool for any entrepreneur looking for free advice. The blogs are ranked by their number of Google Reader subscriptions, though Cheng, himself ranked 33rd, says, “there are many great blogs with fewer subscribers as the number of subscribers doesn’t necessarily correlate to the quality of content.” Nevertheless, resources like this are a great tool for keeping up with what the VC’s are talking about, but how can one possibly manage a blogroll so large? Thankfully, there are plenty of solutions for managing RSS feeds so you can stay on top of it all. Sponsor Along with his list, Cheng offers Google Reader bundles of various breakouts of the list. If 100 blogs is too much, you can alternatively subscribe to the top 10, 25 or 50 blogs. Or if you only want to read blogs from your neck of the woods, there are location based bundles for California, Massachusetts, New York, Europe, Canada and Israel. If you just can’t get enough VC blogs, there’s also an option to get the whole kit and caboodle – over 130 blogs total. Whichever bundle or bundles you choose, Google Reader is an excellent way to filter through your feeds. The best solution for managing a large list is a feature Google recently rolled out: sort by magic. The more you use Google Reader, the more it learns about what kinds of stories you read, and it reflects these trends when it sorts a feed by “magic”. Another tool for sorting through a heavy list of blogs is to use OPML files and filter them through PostRank – a process we described in great detail last January. In short, PostRank takes your list and creates a new feed, sifting through the noise and filtering out only the best and most popular posts. The only drawback is it takes time for PostRank to determine which posts are more popular, periodically dumping out a dozen or so posts at a time. If you really want to stay on top of the VC game, applications like Snackr can provide a scrolling marquee of your feeds across your screen while you continue to work on other things. Snackr is built using Adobe AIR, so it’s compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. Discuss

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How To Keep Track of Over 130 Top VC Bloggers