As mobile phone penetration continues to surge, the years-old hype about the mobile Web being the next big thing is no doubt coming true. But despite all of the industry gurus, conference keynotes and trade magazine articles imploring you to get your business ready for the mobile space, it’s not always easy to know where to begin. Sure, you could hire a team of top-notch mobile developers, but not every business owner has that luxury, especially with the economy still in limbo. Here are a few tools to get started: Sponsor Make Your Website Mobile Friendly Your company’s website may be getting you noticed on the desktop, but what happens when people try to access it from their phones? Probably a lot of pinching, scrolling and squinting. There are a few ways to get your existing site ready for mobile display with minimal coding and development required. One such tool is a hosted solution called Mofuse , which offers an intuitive drag-and-drop interface from which to manage mobile content, design and ads. Plug in an RSS feed URL to pull content in from your company blog (or any source), or simply publish static pages with the most pertinent info. When it’s ready, Mofuse provides several flavors of code snippets for redirecting mobile users from your full-size desktop site to the more mobile-friendly version. Another option is Mobify , a freemium service that takes your existing website and strips it down to only the essentials you want your mobile users to see. The result is a clean, highly usable design that displays for the users who visit your site from their phones. Although they have different pricing plans and feature sets, both Mofuse and Mobify come with custom domains, analytics, ad server integration and e-commerce options. Get Started With QR Codes Although not yet as common in the U.S. as they are in Japan, QR (quick response) codes are popping up more and more in commercial and marketing contexts. These square barcode-esque patterns can be printed on any page or real-world surface to enable users with a QR-equipped mobile phone to scan it and then be be redirected to any URL. These could be used in print advertisements to send users to your mobile site for more information or for special promotional offers. While the jury is still out on if and when QR codes will see widespread adoption in the West, it’s easy to get started using one of the many QR code generators that are out there, including Kaywa QR Code , Delivr and QR Stuff to name a few. Keep it Social This may seem like a no-brainer and the last thing the world needs is somebody else espousing the magic of the social Web, but we would be remiss to discuss going mobile without touching on the most obvious and simple way of getting your brand onto people’s phones. Let’s face it: people access sites like Facebook and Twitter from their phones all day long. If your company has a social media strategy, then it already has the beginnings of a mobile strategy. Phone photo by Thiago Felipe Festa . QR photo by cocreatr . Discuss

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Editor’s note : We offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write posts and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products. Thousands of devices, hundreds of service providers, and dozens of app stores mean that developers must place bets on devices, telcos, and service functionalities. This fragmentation creates risk for developers and cripples innovation across the industry in several ways. Sponsor Complexity : Because they can’t easily develop across devices and telcos, developers today are resigned to the path of least resistance – even when it means leaving money on the table. They opt to program for platforms that give them the most reach and best chance for success, leaving other potentially attractive channels and customers untapped due to a lack of resources. Lack of Bandwidth and Network Investment : Popular, bandwidth-hungry applications – which often run “over the top” using the carrier’s data connection – can overwhelm a network. Service providers, wary of simply providing “dumb pipe” may resist investing in the additional bandwidth needed to support these applications appropriately. Out of Pocket Expense : Most applications, even for the iPhone, fail to achieve large-scale success. Starved for revenue, developers do not want to pay up-front fees for the usage of network functionalities in their applications. As a result, they look for ways to go over the top of a service provider’s network to control costs. For example, rather than use the more refined and costly capabilities of a network’s geo-fencing capability, a mobile ad developer may instead opt for the device-based workaround to reduce expense. This hurts service provider revenue and results in a less capable application. Network Security Fears : Service providers set a high price for accessing network APIs because they have built their business and reputation on reliability and security. This is part of the reason telco APIs are so arcane and that they are only understood by telecom IT managers. As a result, service providers don’t understand what motivates third-party developers, nor do they have the resources and knowledge to properly cultivate and manage a developer ecosystem. Individual App Store Requirements : More than 80 app stores already exist, and the number is rapidly growing. Each imposes its own certification process and requirements. And then of course even if the processes were the same for each one, there is the challenge for developers to manage all of the metadata associated with each version or update across each of the stores. Unrealized Revenue : The barriers created by fragmentation stifle application development by hampering creativity and limit the ability of developers to realize the financial potential of their work. This deprives end users of the best that the Web and telco worlds have to offer. It’s an unsustainable and unstable industry business model, and it must change. There is a Cure Telcos have recognized these problems, and are responding with a cohesive and inclusive strategy that will revolutionize the development and distribution of mobile applications. Turning the telco network into the primary application development platform is the key to this plan. As a single, scalable IP network, it is ideal for collaborating, delivering and managing telco, enterprise and third party applications regardless of access mode and device. It also provides the must haves you’d expected from a robust applications platform: bandwidth scaling, QoS and traffic optimizers, automation, billing and payment, and so on. Using telco development tools and APIs eliminates many of the barriers that have kept service providers and developers apart, enabling application innovation to flourish in an open, mutually beneficial business model. Telco networks are ideal for collaborating, delivering and managing telco, enterprise and third-party applications, regardless of access mode and device. By making the telco network their primary application development platform, developers gain immediate relief from oppressive fragmentation, improving their odds of application success. For instance, developers no longer have to program services to access capabilities such as SMS, MMS or presence on multiple devices. Instead, they can write the functionality once and let the telco network manage optimal performance on consumer devices. Telco networks offer developers unique advantages as an application platform. The next generation of applications will be highly personalized and interactive. They will seamlessly blend voice, data, video and multimedia across all devices and networks, including television, broadband Internet and mobile. Powerful new networks provide the means to do this, and developers can still differentiate their applications. Developers can grab developer-friendly API bundles – accessed using SOAP and REST – that expose unique telco and enterprise capabilities. Rather than investing the time to search and locate APIs for a new social gaming application idea and negotiating the terms of their usage, developers can simply grab a social gaming API bundle – including providing SMS, advertising, virtual goods and location services, for example – at a single location. Access to these API bundles is provided in a bold new revenue sharing business model that properly aligns incentives for developers, service providers and third party API providers. Everyone wins. Next page: Speeds Up Delivery, Accelerates Monetization Speeds Up Delivery, Accelerates Monetization This aggregation model also alleviates fragmentation by enabling developers to automatically share their applications across multiple service providers. This speeds up the delivery of exciting new services, and accelerates monetization. A dashboard tool even provides personalized, detailed real-time business data on applications and their adoption and use by subscribers across a wide array of major apps stores. This new approach will make it easy for developers to bring their applications to market. They will have a single place to upload their application, manage certification and updates, and distribute across multiple stores. In addition, a wholesale service will give apps store managers the ability to browse and select from a pre-certified inventory of developer applications. This gives developers greater reach and app stores more apps. By transforming the telco network into an application development platform that addresses all of the developer’s business requirements – building, testing, management and distribution – the new paradigm for mobile application development is bringing service providers and developers together in new and mutually beneficial ways. The future is mobile, and telcos have realized that their success and your success are intertwined. If you have stayed out of mobile application development because it looked too convoluted a market to traverse, it is time to take another look. Photo by Gonzalo Baeza Hern

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It takes a lot of data to make Shrek. The big guy has to run, eat, talk. How much data? We’re talking in the order of data centers to process the bits to bring the warm-hearted monster to its animated life. The making of an animated film is a look into the changing world of networking and its importance in the making of just about anything these days. Sponsor The big question in today’s networking world is how to reduce network complexity and reduce all the power it takes to manage data centers. That’s the issue Dreamworks faces. Today it was announced the studio has chosen Hewlett-Packard to revamp the networking infrastructure so it can efficiently produce films such as Shrek. Dreamworks is in the business of making animated films. The studio has to have the ability to make films efficiently. In many respects, the number of films that Dreamworks produces in a year is dependent on how well it can use its network to do the core processing of the animated characters it is producing. It’s a similar comparison to what we see with the real-time Web. The Internet is at the center of a dynamic supply chain that requires real-time information to be delivered to the right people in the supply chain as events occur. The challenges are similar in a studio where the network is at the center of the film production process. The evidence is in the credits of any animated film. The number of specialists required to make an animated film represents the bulk of the people employed to produce it. The network is critical for these people to do their work. It’s at the center of the film production process. The Dreamworks story is a window into the new networking reality. The studios face challenges with producing high-quality films quickly and efficiently. For mot enterprises the challenges are different. They are not processing animated characters. Instead the increasing challenge is the structured and unstructured data that has to be organized, stored and shared. Networks are at the center of that issue, too. Companies like HP are betting on the premise that the data center network requires a converged infrastructure to manage the complexities of the Web oriented enterprise. The battle is for the network. Discuss

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Consulting firm Spencer Stuart and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) released the results of a study on VC-backed company leadership today. The study includes data from interviews and from a survey of NVCA members on their attitudes regarding the CEOs who run their companies. Sponsor The survey is a follow-up to a similar one conducted in 2001 and points to some of the trends regarding VC backing over the past decade. In both the 2001 and 2010 studies, for example, VCs listed the strength of the management team as the most important factor when deciding whether or not to fund a company. The market sector, a proprietary product, and the business model trail in significance in that order, the study finds. Vision and fundraising skills are more important skills for CEOs today than they were a decade ago. While vision ranks fourth among important CEO skills in 2010, it was only seventh in the 2001 study. The study’s authors suggest that these results “reflect shifting priorities in an environment where both raising funds and the path to liquidity have become more challenging for VC-backed companies.” Other key findings from the study include: Venture capitalists favor proven venture-backed CEO talent. When seeking management in new industry sectors, 58% of survey respondents favored proven venture-backed CEOs from unrelated sectors over sector entrepreneurs with no CEO experience (31%) or industry leaders from large companies who lack experience in an entrepreneurial environment (11%). Investors are growing more confident in their ability to access executives. Only 4 in 10 venture professionals in 2001 agreed that their firms consistently recruit the best talent and remove low performers quickly. In 2010, 84 percent agreed that their firms recruit the best talent, 63 percent agreed that they consistently and thoroughly assess management teams, and 67 percent agreed that they quickly remove low-performing CEOs. “As they strive to build their next generation of game-changing companies, VCs are starting to take a more scientific approach to recruiting and assessing CEOs and directors,” said Spencer Stuart consultant and study contributor Ben Holzemer. “As they face mounting challenges, firms also have a tremendous opportunity to become more successful in selecting the innovative, entrepreneurial leaders who can guide the industry profitably into the future.” Discuss

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Last week on his blog, Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz diagnosed ” Second Startup Syndrome ,” a condition that many successful entrepreneurs often suffer from. Second Startup Syndrome, says Horowitz, can derail entrepreneurs as they move from one successful startup to founding their next company. Second Startup Syndrome places too much emphasis on business models and not enough on developing the core product, says Horowitz. The company glosses over important details “assuming that what worked the first time will automagically work the second time.” Sponsor But even without suffering from Second Startup Syndrome, a second startup can simply fail to get off the ground. Markets, technologies can quickly change. Past Results Not Indicative of Future Performance Such was the case with Jeff Ready’s company Volt Capital. Ready had planned for Volt Capital to take advantage of some of the natural language processing technology of his past company Corvigo, a successful anti-spam service that he’d just founded and sold. Volt Capital was designed to be a hedge fund, utilizing some of the AI expertise to analyze the stock market. But due to a combination of factors – even before the economy took a nosedive – Volt Capital never got off the ground. Ready was stuck with a major technology investment that he used to successful launch his most recent company, Scale Computing , a data storage service. Volt Capital had built a supercomputer in order to store and process the information it would receive daily from the markets — around 40-60 GB per day. At first, says Ready, he and his business partners thought they would use this hardware to start a virtualization service. After all, VMWare had just gone public and it seemed a good market. But as Ready started to do some research, he found that he’d be better off working to address a storage, rather than a virtualization, solution. Listen and Learn Although it’s easier, perhaps, to learn from a mistake, Ready says it’s just as important for entrepreneurs to learn from their successes as well. You cannot simply assume that because something worked in one company that it will transfer to another. Evolve your idea “before you write a line of code,” urges Ready. He stresses the importance of doing the right research before your engineers get to work. And while plenty can be found via Google, sometimes it’s best to go to people directly. “Cold calling,” recommends Ready, who picked up the phone himself and surveyed a variety of businesses in order to gauge where to develop his next business. It sounds intimidating, perhaps, but these aren’t sales calls. You’re asking for advice, says Ready, and you can earnestly tell the recipient of your call that it’ll be “the most interesting phone conversation you have that day.” These phone conversations can provide you with a good glimpse into the direction of the industry and into the minds of your potential customers. The conversations can provide powerful anecdotes when you make pitches to investors, adds Ready. And these people make great call-backs when you can offer them beta access to your new product or service. The approach that Ready took with forging the direction for Scale Computing placed a lot of value on being “genuine, candid, and useful.” It seems as though these qualities might be good antidotes to Second Startup Syndrome. Discuss

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