Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 7)

Sramana: How do you validate and curate florists in a scalable manner? Farbod Shoraka: We started to use some of our funds to hire a sales team that will help us decide on who to partner with. It is not an automated process. In the end, it creates a lot of value. For BloomNation’s marketplace,

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Steve Bryan, CEO of Vigillo (Part 2)

Steve Bryan: The second way is through inspection stations. In addition to being weighed, the trucks are also subjected to inspections by similarly-trained law enforcement people. Those are the two modes of interaction that trucking companies have with law enforcement. They open up their book and there are about 3,000 different violations that could be written on

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Thursday, August 14 – 226th 1M/1M Mentoring Roundtable For Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 226th FREE online 1M/1M roundtable mentoring session on Thursday, August 14, 2014, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea to Sramana Mitra. You’ll gain straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and she’ll answer any

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Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 6)

Sramana: What metrics did you use to solicit funding? Where were you in terms of revenue? Farbod Shoraka: We used two key metrics. This was very early stage investment, so it was really about the idea and vision. We needed to demonstrate that there was a product market fit. We were able to show that

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Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO, Tony DiCostanzo (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What are some of the major trends that you are tracking and building your strategy around as you’re watching the book business? Tony DiCostanzo: I think the one that’s most prevalent is the momentum that e-books are building in the market. That’s one of the reasons that we pursued and made the investment

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Catching Up On Readings: 19th Century Trick for Best-Sellers

This Wired feature looks at how fan fiction writers are using the nineteenth century trick of serialization to create best-sellers. It could be a new trend in fiction is written and read in the modern world. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Steve Bryan, CEO of Vigillo (Part 1)

I am a big fan of niche Big Data applications. Here’s one focused on the trucking industry! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introduction about yourself as well as Vigillo. Steve Bryan: The Latin word vigillo means vigilant. That is the backbone of what we do for our customers. We are just past our seventh

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Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 5)

Sramana: How long did it take you to launch the first version of the site? Farbod Shoraka: Once we won the money, we hired a developer and spent a few months building the first version of BloomNation.com. It was an alpha platform to give florists an idea of where we were headed. It was enough

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