ReadWriteWeb

A popular trend among startups these days is to create a video pitch. Cameras are cheaper, and do-it-yourself applications like iMovie on the Mac make video editing fun and easy. But like any form of new media, video is not just a secondary platform on which to present a carbon copy of something from an earlier medium; in other words, a video pitch needs to take advantage of the fact that it's a video. Videos have motion and interactivity and the ability to show anything with pictures and animation, which is much more than we can say simply with text.

Personal investor and Hunch CEO Chris Dixon posted an interesting article yesterday titled, Every time an engineer joins Google, a startup dies. The gist of the article is that Dixon believes venture capitalists should be doing more to keep the top entrepreneurial whiz kids from seeking jobs at big companies like Google or Goldman Sachs because larger companies aren't driving innovation as much as startups do. Innovation, he says, is the key to improving low VC returns over the last several years, not scaling back investments as others have suggested.

The media feeding frenzy around the newly released Apple iPad has finally reached critical mass as the device was unveiled to the masses today in San Francisco. Some people love it for features like the $499 entry-level price tag, while others are disappointed to learn the device lacks a camera.

One of the biggest announcements Apple made today was the updated versions of the iWork productivity applications, which will run on the iPad with full multi touch integration. Keynote, Pages and Numbers will all be available on the iPad when it goes on sale in a few months - and all at just $9.99 per app.

Lately on the startup blogosphere there has been a lot of talk about lawyers and how they relate to startups and entrepreneurs. A few weeks ago, Scott Edward Walker, a guest author on Venture Hacks, posted his Top 10 reasons why entrepreneurs hate lawyers, which prompted venture capitalist Mark Suster to write How to Work with Lawyers at a Startup.

Regardless of whether lawyers are something entrepreneurs should loathe or love, it seems as though a curation of legal resources for startups was in order. The following is a list (in no particular order or rank) of blogs, articles, websites, VC tips and other online resources for entrepreneurs and startups.

Thanks to all who sent in their stories of gritty entrepreneurs. To those who just copied the standard PR spiel with an opening line about "gritty entrepreneurs", please stop! We will be doing some interviews. Right now we are parsing through the incoming stories to classify and spot some trends.

The first big question that jumps out is: where are the profitable VC funded web ventures?

What a week of market mayhem! How odd having that as the backdrop to the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. We have been sounding alerts about the economic backdrop to our world of innovation for nearly a year. Back in February we wrote that this is not our bubble. Since then, the news from the economy has gotten worse and nobody is suggesting it will get better any time soon. Reading the papers is pretty grim (unless you stick to Sports or Arts). Yet we contend that it is not grim in the 'innovation economy'. Here's why...

Casual gaming on the web must look like quite an attractive market to VCs right now. Jeff Bezos already invested in two casual gaming companies this year, Kongregate and SGN, after SGN had already raised a $15 million Series A round in January. Now, Mark Pincus' Zynga, another online gaming site, announced that it raised $29 million in a Series B round led by Kleiner Perkins. Zynga also announced the acquisition of YooVille, a virtual world application for Facebook.

Back in early October I posted about coming economic storms and what entrepreneurs could do to prepare. Given recent news, it is now almost certain that we are in recession. The bad news from financial institutions and credit markets is like a steady drumbeat, so it would be easy to write about “battening down the hatches” or even jumping for the lifeboats.

Far from it. These are great times for entrepreneurs. Really. This is not our bubble. We had our bubble and it burst in March 2000.