ReadWriteWeb

The flood of news from Google I/O continues as the company has announced a pair of services available to developers that provide public access to some of Google's internal data-analysis tools. BigQuery, a service for analyzing massively large sets of data, and Prediction API, an interface for utilizing Google's prediction algorithms, are now available to developers in the Google Code Labs. To break down these heavy new tools, we spoke with former Apple engineer and big-data geek Pete Warden.

Warden believes these new tools from Google could commoditize previously close-guarded technologies, allowing startups to quickly and easily leverage things like sentiment-analysis. "Assuming it does what it says on the label, this opens up a lot of technology problems to bootstrapped startups that previously required serious funding to tackle," he told ReadWriteWeb.

Earlier this month, Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz brought up an interesting topic surrounding the hiring and firing of executives at startups. While talking with a pair of his friends - one a VC and the other a startup CEO - the CEO asked if he should get rid of an executive as the company grows larger because he lacks experience leading a larger company. As Horowitz explains in his post "The Scale Anticipation Fallacy," he believes passing judgement based on how an executive might perform in the future is ludicrous.

Entrepreneur and professor Steve Blank authored a blog this morning that expressed his opinion that business plan competitions are useless to startup culture and should be scrapped for business model competitions. Business plan competitions are just what they sound like: students are encouraged to submit a business plan and a winner is selected by a panel of judges, often resulting in some monetary reward for the triumphant student. Blank argues that models, not plans, are much more applicable to the iterative startup atmosphere, but not everyone agrees that business plans are entirely irrelevant.

If you tell most folks that Diaspora is promising to build a distributed, open-source social network, they are apt look at you glassy-eyed. Perhaps they'll nod and say, "Oh. Cool." Tell those same people that Diaspora is promising to build an alternative to Facebook, and they're much more likely to know what you are talking about. And as of late, it's much more likely they'll nod and say, "Oh! Cool!" - and mean it.

The businesses of the 21st century are rapidly evolving to incorporate radical new methods of running a business and managing employees, and no group knows this better than the startup community. Startups have been at the cutting edge of innovation not only in the products they create, but in the way they run their companies and treat their workers. In this week's Weekend Reading selection, we look into how years of scientific research has uncovered what motivates people to be outstanding employees and how successful companies are incorporating these methods.

For many successful startups, there exists a point where their product is popular enough to grow beyond the minimum viable product, but is yet to be discovered by millions more that may be turned off if the service is too complicated. Internet startups need to find a balance between keeping the power users interested, while not overwhelming the newbies. According to Spark Capital's Bijan Sabet, Tumblr, a rapidly growing micro-blogging service, is one company doing a beautiful job of finding this balance by turning the "less is more" mantra into "less and more."

Over the weekend, startup accelerator TechStars announced a partnership with Startupbootcamp, a Copenhagen-based incubator and the very first member of a new global affiliate program hosted by TechStars. With programs in Boulder, Boston and Seattle, TechStars is now expanding and "open sourcing" their incubation model by providing guidance and support for independent international startup accelerators. A TechStars presence in Europe, in any way, shape or form, is a positive step for seed funding in Europe, which - as we've discussed earlier - is in dire need of growth.

In my last post, I wrote about the importance of building a solid Advisory Board. An Advisory Board ensures that as your startup grows, you have a trusted set of mentors you can turn to for advice on shaping your business strategy.

And while it's important to take others' input into consideration, frankly, sometimes it can be just as important to ignore it.

Entrepreneurs are oftentimes bombarded with advice - some of it useful and some of it destructive. It can be disconcerting to hear feedback from people that don't understand your project or your vision. And it can be frustrating to face rejection from potential investors, partners, or customers.

No matter how carefully you build your founding team, questions will come up as you start your business that will make you want to turn elsewhere for advice. And so it's good to have a carefully selected group of people you can turn to for help: your Advisory Board.

As Bernard Lumm notes in "Startup 101, "You may have any number of advisers - friends and family - who you turn to informally for advice and who expect nothing in return except your friendship. But we use Advisers here with a capital "A" to denote someone with an official, compensated relationship with the company."

A great discussion about opportunities for mobile startups kicked off in the first session of today's RWW Mobile Summit in Mountain View, California. The challenge was proposed to brainstorm possible markets for mobile that are not being served, or served well. In the small group discussion, we all agreed that location-based advertisements, for the most part, have not been able to break through into higher levels of success. So what lies in the way of a truly successful mobile location-based ad platform?