Sleaze-ball's wear suit too, they usually talk about how much money they can raise for their project, only if you will build it for little equity and zero compensation.

I had been working on a technology a couple of years back in Silicon valley.  It was hot stuff and  it was right in tune with some very relevant changes in web advertising. I wrote a provisional patent and started seeking partners. I spoke with a few guys in Palo Alto and later tried to get a startup going with them. My role was to  build the technology and their job was to introduce me to investors and help raise capital. They claimed to be big-wigs connected with all sorts of investors.

Well, in the end they they failed to deliver the funding , so I went out to seek my own. It was not until a couple months later down the road  while sitting down with a high powered IP technology attorney in silicon valley, i got a shock of my life. This attorney found out about these other “short-lived” partners of mine, and this is verbatim  what i heard come out of his mouth.

“You know Dylan in this town there people out there who try to take advantage of inventors like your self, guys like you who  really innovate. They do this because they have a serious lack of ability and or creativity, they are what we in the technology industry call parasites. And it looks like you have a couple of them trying to hang on your coat tails here. I am sorry, but you need to figure a way to shake them before you can go forward. They are trying to claim ownership on your patents here. I am really sorry.”

I was astounded literally knocked on the floor!  I mean, to learn that people I had trusted and been working with, but who  failed to get my ideas the traction they needed, would actually claim my work as their own. It was simply unheard of in my world. This was the first time that I learned about these “wanna-be free loader” dot.com entrepreneurs.  They are all over the place.  If your a skilled technologist and entrepreneur, just post your resume on Craigslist  and you will likely get an email or call from a few of them.

These kinds of low-lifes look for and prey upon the people who have all the skills that they lack. Their first goal is to get someone else to build their get rich quick schemes as quickly as possible. Then screw them as fast as possible.

I have put together some red flags that should warn you about these wannabe dot.com entrepreneurs. Just some sound advice from a serial entrepreneur who has been around the block.

1. They speak with a lot of Buzz Words….
   First off these kinds of individuals are trying to sound smart with out really saying anything at all. Their lack of experience gives them away very quickly, and when pressed for the significance of their rhetoric you will quickly find out that they are out of their league.
2. They have ZERO actual experience in a DOT.com…
   Easy to validate, ask them how many companies they have founded, launched and sold recently or even in the last several years. Check their credentials if they say so. Ask for the name of the buyer, and call or email them. Verify their entrepreneur history.
3. They beat you up over your compensation or equity, or flat out offer you 1%-3% of their company for your hard work…
   This is often the biggest tell tale sign of a con-artist, these wannabe’s give you lots of lip service with very little actual substance. Their position is that an idea and a name are so valuable that they can get any developer to do it for peanuts because that’s how everyone else who is a dot.com success got their. Just look around at the really successful internet sites and you will realize that they are completely wrong. 99% of all successful start-ups are founded and run by real technologists, not fake-o’s.
   When it comes to compensation you should be compensated at full value of your work in equity if they don’t have cash to pay for it. This is what sets your equity in the company. So agreeing upon the overall value of your work if they were to hire you or your company at retail market price is critical. If you discount your work for any reason, be sure that the discounted value is written into your contract against the other founders contribution. Its a simple formula.  If its going to take 3 months to develop a Java based website with mobile API fro example, the market rate may be at around $80-$100 per hour. This means if your spending 60+ hours a week for three months your equity contribution is estimated at around $6000 per week. Times the 12 weeks to build the software, you looking at $72,000  in contribution. Thats real money from your pocket. Be sure to have your paper work acknowledge this, this usually will get the dot.com wannabe to run quickly in the opposite direction. These kinds of people don’t see what you do for a living as having any value. So dont be surprised if they give you hell over such a equity investment.
4. Failure to comprehend the importance of sound engineering…
   The fact that it takes time to build innovative products is also lost on these kinds of individuals. They lack the basic knowledge of software design and see it as something which can be bought and rapidly deployed, citing out of the box CMS tools or PHP based website clone scripts as their model for building a multi-million member website.
5. They will try to micro manage you…
   I mean come on. your a highly qualified engineer and innovator, why the hell do you need to have some nit-witt breathing over your shoulder while you build anything. If you were incapable of doing the job why the heck did they sign up to partner with you in the first place?  This simply comes down to a power and control thing.  They want you to be on the defense so you can not get perspective on their ripp-off / con-artist angles.

In the end there are many more ways to detect wanna-be con-artist dot.com entrepreneurs than listed hear. This is a few from my experience. This should help you a bit when identifying  these sleeze-balls that come at you.  Good luck.  Ciao.

Beating the wannabe dot-com entrepreneurs at their own game.

Innovation requires a different kind of approach. There are many people over the years who have profound vision yet lack the ability to deliver on their ideas.  I have meet my share over the years. Building technology into a website is only part of the process, and yet without it companies can not launch. It takes months of design work, planning, and execution to make a profound and relevant technology / innovative solution for the market place.

Over the years I have dealt with clients and partners who have big lofty goals of making it big on the web. They hear of geeks launching massive sites and only if they too could find a way to make internet millions from their half baked ideas. Its a fools erand to think someone who knows nothing about technology can become a technologist over night , just because they have a website and a logo.

I can assure you i have seen it time and again, even worked with these kinds of people. I would love to share with you a few stories about many of them in some posts. Lets just say that the delusional and often times misguided dreams of simply dreamers can take us to places of understanding about human psychology that we never really wanted to lean in the first place.

Take for example a recent client. A Seattle startup who’s  quote “Founder” can from a little town in the mid-west, they had some fancy idea of building the next best social networking tool since sliced bread.  They had a small budget yet, couldn’t find any company worth their salt to build it.  They hunted around and pitched investors on a “Pie in the sky” idea, and all the investors simply said “Build it, and then we will talk”. So they contacted me. Here is where I made my mistake. I knew that it would cost nearly a half million to properly design and build this project, but their supposed connections would raise funding at  a later point in time.

Well i underbid the prototype because I saw that these people had a few of the pieces, I knew that I would bring a massive technology and innovative approach to the project. I saw this simply as an investment opportunity.  In the end, I found that this company was simply looking to get rich quick, didn’t have the foggiest idea of how to run a software company or dot.com for the least part, and inevitably failed in honoring the contract i had with them.

I found that working with their failed business model and ” amateur “   team that they put together from a few weeks of Craigslist  resume poaching, gave me a headache. Not only did they have un realistic ideas about the cost of software development, but they had misguided ideas about the delivery timelines, of the technology. Understanding the software development cycle is a basic failure of many non-technical start up entrepreneurs. The non-technical team members rarely bring very much to the table early on, besides a handful of ideas and and a lot of baggage. Be sure to negotiate your position in a startup that respects your skill level and contributions.

There are numerous examples where dealing with non-technical clients or potential business partners can bite you in the proverbial rear-end. Be sure to analyze your risk and the benefits thoroughly before undertaking this kind of venture.  In the future I plan to write some enlightening essays on how to avoid these blatant con-artists and get rich quick schemers. There are thousands of them out there and for you the entrepreneurial software architect there are a few lesson I am sure you will find educational and entertaining.

Check back soon for the case studies and low down on how to avoid these kinds of non-technical “IDEA ” people. I will point out some of the red flags and what you should do given a failure or breach of contract with these “free-loaders”.  Until the next time, keep on doing what you do. Ciao.

Palo Alto, CA
May 28th 2010
12:35 PM

A new real-time search platform debuts.

FleeQ.com a unique real-time semantic search engine has launched a beta version of its platform! Touting the broadest search engine available on the market, FleeQ delivers real time semantic results from all the search engines, and places relevance in the hands of the users.

The unique semantic search algorithm, was designed, built, and funded by search engine architect and serial entrepreneur Dylan Rosario. “The fleeQ platform drives relevance with a friendly, user interface that enables discovery on multiple levels.”, stated Rosario. The user experience is interlaced with web 2.0 technology. fleeQ has integrated sharing and voting algorithms which improve the semantic ranking of search results across the engine.

“FleeQ is really a unique offering in semantic discovery,” says Rosario “it solves search fatigue, and helps when one search engine is not enough. fleeQ succeeds by enabling users to compare the results of the top organic search engines and social web side-by-side in real time. We believe its a real web 3.0 platform.”

This is not the first search engine designed by Mr. Rosario and the fleeQ.com team. “The fleeQ concept started in 2007, I launched a search advertising start up in 2008 but ran into capitalization issues during this last downturn and unfortunately had to close the doors on that company. I learned a few big lessons and went back to the drawing board. I retained ownership of my brands and in 2009 I built a new team in California. I realized that I were still very interested in search engine design. So pulling on my past experience designing search engines at IBM we started over fresh.” says Dylan.

In a space that has long been coveted by many startups as the holy grail in web design, building an effective and engaging search engine experience for consumers has evaded many entrepreneurs. Dozens of companies such as Mahalo, Cognition, DeepDyve, SenseBot, Infospace, Hakia, Cuil, and others continue to drive innovation in the search engine design industry. fleeQ aims to deliver a compelling experience amongst numerous search competition.

“After investing over a quarter million towards the development of this new platform. We are finally ready for beta testing.” says Larry Choy the Chief Financial Officer of fleeQ. “Growing a business organically is a mantra that we strongly believed in. Today, fleeQ needs to look at the future and its capital growth. Bringing on outside investors is something we will openly consider given the right synergy and capitalization.As for now we are generating cash flow and growing the network every day”. FleeQ, is a privately held company.

The company is growing its user base organically, and it continues to gain momentum with its vertical search clients. fleeQ recently deployed a new vertical search platform based on its patent pending XML Hydra architecture. Branded as d0nate.org, the new platform is a semantic version of the fleeQ technology targeting the non-profit organization.

“d0nate.org will level the playing field for online advertising where non-profits can now earn money directly from their supporter base. Furthermore the platform allows non-profits to cut out the big search engines by integrating with our direct pay-per-click advertising platform.” says Jose Montes director of fleeQ Sales. “Our model is comprehensive and features new direct advertising technologies that produce greater revenue per click than any comparable contextual solution.”

d0nate.org provides a new approach to branded / white label search. Unlike its competitor GoodSearch.com, d0nate.org brands and helps build the non-profits name recognition by employing its white label platform and unique search experience. d0nate.org offers a shopping and search affiliate system that brings over 40 million products and offers into a unified marketing platform.

“We see d0nate.org as a unique opportunity for not only for our client organizations to earn money, but a new way for donors to support a cause with zero out of pocket expense, simply by using the respective d0nate.org powered search engine.” says Montes.

fleeQ.com – is a privately held company based in Palo Alto, CA. Delivering unique user and search technologies in the Semantic Web 3.0 space. FleeQ search engines power dozens of non-profit sites and social media blogs. You can find out more information on the company online at http://www.fleeq.com or for further information contact Dylan Rosario via email at dylan@fleeq.com or by phone at 650-488-7510.

The more educated you are about buying a home, the better decisions you’ll make. …and the more fun you’ll have along the way! For most home-buyers, the dilemma isn’t getting information (with the web, newspapers, advertisements, friends, family, books, etc.) — it’s more: How do I sort through it all? What works and what doesn’t? Who can I trust? What pertains to this state and region, and what doesn’t? What are current trends in neighborhoods I like?

To answer these questions, our course philosophy is to present an organized step-by-step home buying process as a team of experienced professionals. We explain to you your options, and provide you with a logical framework to make decisions. It’s fun, and there’s time to ask questions, both during and after class.

d0nate.org is a brandable (a.k.a. white label) search engine for Non-profits. Simply put, d0nate.org focuses on providing a unique a fund raising and donation platform. �It enables non-profit organizations to take advantage of the same revenue generating business model used by Google, Bing, Yahoo, and many other search engines. Advertising.

Our platforms helps the non-profit earn money from something their supporters do every day, search the web. This is done at no cost to the supporters / donors.

Donate search helps non-profits do three things simultaneously

1. Raise money from supporters patronage of advertisers 24/7/365
2. Retain a strong trusted brand with their supporters / donors
3. It enables communication and drive awareness for their cause or organization

d0nate.org is based on patent pending technology.

I have really been wanting to cover a number of Web technologies. I have opinions and insight on the use of various technologies for marketing and promotional purposes. Many of the concepts and technologies involve developing code, and integration of services in order to facilitate many of the techniques are used in marketing.

This section of my website will discuss specific technologies, as well as give examples of their use on your website. I will try my best to provide code examples and outline the features and benefits.

Some of the concepts or categories I will cover are:

• social media
• APIs
• video
• advertising
• and many more

I hope you enjoy my code examples and find them useful please feel free  to post questions or responses. And if you happen to find an amazing new technology don’t hesitate to contact me here to share your news.

Ciao for now.  Dylan

I wanted to do something special  For the redesign of my Web 3.0 search engine.  After a  almost a year and a half, I wanted it to reflect the variations of search options that  this powerful tool embodies.  It was not enough just to pick a Web 2.0 design which we already had.

The new search engine interface for the flash version features floating bouncing icons and a fresh  interface.

I hope you enjoy it.

Dylan

Admincome is a  Small medium business  focused Human Resources Outsourcing company, With offices located in Alameda,  California.  the needed a comprehensive online presence outlining their services and features. Furthermore the organization offers web-based solutions for time tracking and payroll.

Our solution Inc. the use of blogging, twitter.com, youtube.com,  and the sitepa.com  to add interactivity to the experience.

ThreeStepDating.com is one of my latest success stories. Working with Renessa Rios and Rob Zaharra of Seattle, WA we have been able to deliver a comprehensive community and information portal for Renessa’s dating & match making service.

Incorporating a number of design and marketing concepts, three step dating.com  has skyrocketed from a little-known agency to one of the top   matchmaking services in Seattle. Utilizing Word press blogging software, NING.com  social network, Youtube.com, and iContact  we have been able to deliver an end to end experience for her existing clientele and future  customers.

You can see some of the services and features of her websites online by clicking here.

It is my opinion that video is critical to small business. I have seen and recorded profound success from the appropriate use of video on websites.  Back in 1994 when I started using the web it was on dial up connections at less than 54kbits per second. Today we have high speed internet dozens even hundreds of times faster than dial up.

Video has been online since the beginning, but the proliferation of Broad Band has make the use of video jump one-hundred fold.

My first experience with video online was circa 1996 where you had to wait hours if not days to grab a short 30 minute clip from a website. More often than not, the video was grainy and low quality. Today we have HD!

Using video is profound, and in a TV centric society it is critical to the success of any organization to embrace the medium and use it to its full potential. I have several case studies to share soon about effective use of video so say tuned.

Ciao for now.

Dylan Rosario

MARcutting.com – Founder