Columbia entrepreneurs, I think you’ve finally been heard.

The Columbia Venture Community looks poised to be the group that finally brings entrepreneurship to the forefront of the Columbia community (and if not, it at least looks like it could save a senior or two from unwittingly going into banking or consulting).

I’ve written about the Columbia entrepreneur community, or lack thereof, before. In fact, it was my first post. Over the past several months, however, I’ve noticed a marked change in the buzz over Columbia’s commitment to entrepreneurship. It’s come from several places. The focus group I mentioned in my first post was organized by the Columbia Center for Career Education. In April, I attended a Business School-run event, the Columbia Entrepreneur Organization’s Pitchfest. In May, I attended my first Columbia Venture Community event run by Mark Peter Davis, a Business School alumn.

It was at the CVC event that it really felt like things were starting to come together. It was the first time I had really seen a group for all of Columbia — alumni, engineers, business, law, etc. It was the first time I saw an event and a group that looked like they had staying power. Not since CORE somehow got Mark Cuban to speak on campus have I felt that. (I’m not sure if CORE still operates since they’re still sporting the several years old Cuban photo so maybe this is a bad comparison?)

On Tuesday of this week, I attended my third Columbia Venture Community event (one of them slipped through my blogging fingers). On a lazy August day at 6pm on the upper west side, I was shocked to find 50+ people in the basement of Lerner Hall. School’s not even in session!

There were 50+ real, living and breathing people with some affiliation to Columbia who weren’t off ’summering’ elsewhere for August (which probably means there weren’t too many VCs in the crowd), and who couldn’t think of anything they’d rather be doing than talking about startups. Brilliant!

I spent the networking portion of the night speaking with a variety of interesting people that helped reaffirm my gut feeling about CVC. GoodGame TV developer, Oliver, and I talked about getting started in PHP. GoodGame TV features an entertaining series of videos covering everything gaming related. Great content, not so great UI. (Oliver, expect an email from me. I think a few simple changes would take care of some of the UI issues). I also chatted a bit with Vikram Venkatraman and Sol Kahn, both classmates, colleagues, and friends from our mutual obessions with entrepreneurship.

Tejpaul Bhatia, founder of MediaMerx, promised a Guide to Raising Venture Capital post for Enter Venture in the future — and yes, I will hold you to that Tej. “Everything you’ve ever heard about raising money on blogs is wrong” Tej told a few us. We look forward to hearing what’s right, Tej. I also enjoyed conversations with Frances Ning and Jonathan Wegner. Jonathan’s business card he gave me at my first CVC event still ranks as one of the best I’ve ever picked up. Frances was notable as one of the few women at the event and aspired to to build feeder organizations that would bring Chinese nurses to America.

Everywhere I stepped I was tripping over interesting people, and again, remember, this is August.

Unfortunately, I was not able to stay for most of the presentations, but I was able to see Bartek Ringwelski and Sasha Davidov present InterviewPoint. InterviewPoint is a database of real interview questions from real interviews as recorded by real students. Users can share questions and strategies, as well as benchmark their resumes against other students in similar interviews. I haven’t been in the banking / consulting interview mindset for awhile now, but something tells me that a Vault guide + InterviewPoint combo would be the perfect recipe for your banking or consulting interview.

Of course, this is the Columbia Venture Community. After realizing you could start your own InterviewPoint, there’s no reason for you to go on that consulting or banking interview after all. With all of this excitement around the Columbia entrepreneurial community, there’s no better time to shun the all too familiar Columbia paths. Come out, meet other entrepreneurs, and see what else is out there beyond the banking / consulting world. Bring friends. Join a startup. Start a startup.

It figures that this group has only now come along just as I’m about to move to San Francisco. Two years since I’ve graduated from engineering school, it’s great to finally see entrepreneurship gaining some traction at Columbia.

Farewell CVC and good luck. I expect a Zuckerberg or two by the time I get back to NYC.

I’m writing this post from WordPress’s iPhone application. To see what I think of it, read to the end.

After my first iPhone App Store review, I realized I’d made a mistake. I hadn’t dug nearly deep enough to really comment on the App Store. I had only begun to try out many of the applications, and as I admitted, I’d really stayed away from paid applications.

So let’s do this again, shall we? I even paid for an application or two this time. (Imagine that, people paying for software.)

5 More of My Favorite Apps

1. Jambd - I am the last person in the world that would ever use this celebrity and gossip new application, but that doesn’t mean it’s not great. Jambd just works and works well. No crashes (Nytimes take note), fast load times, and a great way to browse a stack of related pictures make this application a joy to use.

2. Crash Bandicoot Racing - If you’ve ever played any of Nintendo’s Mario Cart racing titles, you’ll know what this game is. You drive around by rotating your iPhone like a steering wheel and fire missiles and bombs at your racing opponents with a few taps on the screen. This game has great gameplay and Nintendo GameCube-level graphics. It’s well worth the $9.99 and has probably sucked up way more of my time than I would like to admit.

3. Pocketpedia - This serves a direct need of mine that I’ve been supporting with various emails and notes on my iPhone. Pocketpedia allows you to search Amazon and build lists of items you want. This is exactly the solution I was hoping for while browsing Strand Bookstore during many of my lunch breaks this past year.

4. AOL Radio - Boston probably has one of the country’s best set of rock stations. With AOL Radio I can listen to at least 2 of my favorite stations no matter where I am. If only it had all radio stations, it might be a killer application.

5. Sportstap - Sportstap is one of the few applications that subtly uses mobile ads. It’s also the only sports application that is covering the Olympics as far as I can tell. That differentiation has helped make my primary sports application selection a lot easier.

5 More Apps with Potential

1. pTerm - This is a great application for running SSH on-the-go. All you command line junkies take note.

2. Glucose Charter - If you’ve ever seen a friend prick their finger to get a blood sample to measure their blood sugar, you have to think applications like this have potential. Hopefully with better access to information and nutritional tracking, this will save a finger or two.

3. Education Applications like Molecules and 3D Earth - Both of these applications bring education a step closer to the 3D world. Imagine if kids learned organic chemistry from 3D models all the time. They’d spend less of their time trying to draw sticks and lines to simulate 3D and more time visualizing 3D structures from the beginning.

4. Bible - You can search the Bible from you pocket. My high school would have practically required this thing.

5. MixMaster - Who’s hasn’t wanted to mix a little something at one point or another?

5 Apps I Hate

1. CraigsMobileList - I like that I can get a little bit of Craigslist with this, I guess. Why are is this interface so crowded though? Why can I save searches but I can’t save pages? Why can’t I get more than 25 results? I’m not sure what happened with this one, and I want my money back.

2. Lander - This, like many basic games for iPhone, could be fun for a minute or two. What bugs me about this application is that I have no idea how to play and there’s no simply no guide / help / rules with the application. Seriously, nothing is unacceptable.

3. Pour1Out- I wanted to like this application, but it simply doesn’t work well.

4. Tasks - The interface isn’t completely intuitive and I think a task application should be a lot more organized.

5. Jott - I’d long ago given up on voice recording services, but only 15 seconds of recording time is still way below my expectations.

One of the things I love about the App Store is how new it is. No one knows what they’re talking about with this thing. The playing field is relatively level, the startup costs seemingly reasonable, and the opportunity I’d there. You can even get paid for your software.

Early entrepreneurs would be smart to use this platform. There aren’t as many iPhone users as there are Internet users, but there’s not nearly as much competition here either. The number of iPhone and iPhone-like phones is only going to continue to grow. Every business has the opportunity to establish themselves in this marketplace. What we’re seeing now is a race to become primary destinations. There are $9.99 applications that do the same as free applications. That’ll change.

It’s going to be great seeing this new market unfold itself (especially if Apple would start releasing these things faster).

As for the WordPress iPhone application — not bad. I don’t think I’ll write many more like this because this has taken forever, but I love that I can if I want to. It’s a bit of a pain without WYSIWYG, and typing HTML on a keyboard is tedious. It just means I would have to keep basic formatting with these posts.

About a month ago, I was looking for a quick and easy way to play around with a lucene index to prepare for an interview. I looked high and low for something I could implement quick and easy, but to no avail. I found a lucene search for MediaWiki, but the documentation was terrible. I looked at the Zend_Search_Lucene module to see if I could quickly put something together with the Zend Framework — nope, I was quickly over my head.

Fortunately though, Kenny Katzgrau was not over his head. I found his blog, Code Fury, where he alluded to a WordPress plugin he was working on that would leverage a stripped down version of Zend_Search_Lucene to greatly improve WordPress searches. As far as I was concerned, this was the best of both worlds. I could play around with lucene, and I could improve Enter Venture’s search function.

After contacting him, Kenny was kind enough to let me play around with an earlier, pre-alpha version of wpSearch. I had a bit of trouble with the initial install, but search results were better than my default WordPress search. The plugin used an Ajax layer to display search results, rather than my native search template, which I didn’t like. Not so anymore.

This version of wpSearch is great. It seamlessly integrates with my Enter Venture search template. It offers the ability to customize the search relevancy on Titles, Content, and Tags, and the results speak for themselves. Just check out the top 5 results for a few keywords with the default Wordpress search versus wpSearch:

For the majority of these results, wpSearch finds exactly what I’m looking for while the default Wordpress search seems to return the same results time after time. The two have similarly relevant “new york” searches (which is to say, neither is perfect), but wpSearch is perfect on the “book” search as it finds 5 of my 6 book posts in the top 5 results. My 6th book post came in at number 6.

The one knock on wpSearch is that the install may slip some people up. There are a few steps to complete, and it still looks like some kinks need to be worked out based on the WordPress plugins page’s comments. It’s much better than the original version and should only get easier.

Congrats to Kenny for putting together what seems like a potentially great new way to search with Wordpress. I look forward to future releases.

Everyone else, let me know what you think of wpSearch.

I typically try to avoid writing about common tech stories. I choose not to talk about Facebook or Twitter outages (note for early entrepreneurs though — having too many users isn’t the worst problem). There’s just not much to add with these topics.

I am, however, really excited to talk about iPhone applications because I’m really excited to have my iPhone back. I’ve been without it for 3 months since I dropped and cracked the screen. I have replaced the phone just in time for the App Store, which is a much cooler, easier to use version of the CNET Download.com site, tailored specifically for the iPhone.

Some of the blogosphere’s response to the App Store launch has been critical. That NDA issue is a big deal, but it’s solvable. I think some of the prices are misguided — $10 for Tetris?! Really? Can I get an iPhone-crash-free guarantee with that? The market will ultimately take care of this too.

On the whole, this particular user is completely satisfied with the first release of applications and looking forward to future mobile innovations on the App Store. As a glimpse of that future, here are my top applications and ideas for applications.

Feel free to add your own ideas to the Comments.

5 Favorite iPhone Apps

1. Mlb.com At Bat - Have you ever seen video playback of this quality on any computer? I have a MLB.tv subscription, and it never, ever looks as good as the replays you can watch on Mlb.com At Bat just minutes after the play occurs. Mlb.com At Bat is like having a personalized, DVD quality version of Baseball Tonight’s highlight reel in your pocket.
2. Pandora - Apparently Pandora’s been around forever because my roomate remembers first hearing about them in college. If it weren’t for the iPhone, I might never have known about Pandora. I don’t think I’m alone here. Pandora’s online radio just became a whole lot more compelling now that I can carry it with me.
3. Google - Google has an iPhone version for a lot of its major products so they’re obviously at the top of the list. GChat and Google Reader are my two personal favorites.
4. Wordpress - I have not used the Wordpress application too much yet, but I already know I love it. The level of control it gives me over my blog at all times is reassuring. The Guarantee Fairy has nothing on that.
5. (Tie) Truveo & Twittelator - At first, I would have said Twittelator. This level of access to Twitter has made me much more active with the service and is what prompted this post. At the same time, I just spent half an hour checking out Obama in Berlin videos on Truveo. I’m hooked on both of these applications.

5 iPhone Apps with Potential

1. PayPal - Paypal’s application is a great example of clean, simple, easy-to-use design. I wish I had more reasons to send money to people with email addresses just to try it out.
2. Bloomberg - The iPhone application is nothing compared to a Bloomberg terminal, but it’s certainly of the same quality and style.
3. NYTimes - This application would be great if it would just stop crashing. I’ll read the NYTimes and use this application all the time as soon as it’s updated.
4. All Games - Most Games are paid applications. The problem I have with the paid applications is that they’re mostly in beta. I want to see the dust settle a bit on paid applications before I start pulling my credit card out. (The MLB application doesn’t count. I had to have that.)
5. Shakespeare - I walk around with the entire collection of Shakespeare in my pocket these days. If that doesn’t get you laid in literature circles, it at least speaks to the potential of online books for the iPhone.

5 Apps I Want

1. Credit Card Sensor - This requires a bit more infrastructure than a simple application, but it’d be an amazing leap toward the idea of having one application in your pocket. If you could figure out a way to put any item in my wallet on my phone, it would also make this list.
2. More Video Applications - I want an application that gives me quick news updates, movie previews, downloadable content, etc. Truveo’s a search engine. I want a better content provider application.
3. Emergency Services Contact - By leveraging the iPhone’s location awareness services, this application could determine a caller’s exact location immediately for police / fire fighthers / ambulances to immediately navigate to the scene.
4. Level - I know, this is random, but who hasn’t needed a level when they’re hanging a picture? I’m sure someone could make a simple level tool that every iPhone-carrying-window-hanger would love. Update: There is a level for iPhone. PosiMotion has an “A Level” application. iPhone-carrying-window-hangers rejoice!
5. Fingerprint recognition unlock - I love the idea of having a lock on my iPhone. With my notes, my calendar, contacts, email, etc. on my iPhone, I think that makes sense. The problem is, I can’t stand the idea of having to unlock my iPhone every single time I want to use it. This thing has a touch screen, right? I’d love to simply press my finger to a point on the phone to both activate and unlock it. That’d be both security and convenience.

I know a few of these things are impossible right now given the restrictions Apple’s put on the iPhone SDK, but give it time. The walls will slowly come down.

When it comes to startups, you’re always told to narrow your idea. Focus on a niche community, rather than take on the whole world. Refine.

When it comes to experience, though, early entrepreneurs should broaden themselves. When you’re starting out, participate in a wide swath of activities to better understand each part of a business. Write a business plan. Code part of your site. Try testing the site. Present your pitch. Whereas a scientist knows how to do research, an entrepreneur must know how to do the research, the grant writing, the accounting, and the floor mopping.

Widening your experiences also teaches you what you’re not good at. When it comes time to build your perfect team, experience will tell you that maybe you’re not the best guy for accounting, even though you know how to do it. Find a rock star accountant as soon as you can.

In the spirit of this idea, here are the 5 ways I try to broaden my experiences:

1. Read.

I’m an RSS (and book) junkie. I read anything from typography and web standards to financing and marketing (and biographies, fiction novels, and an occasional book of the Core Curriculum variety).

2. Get out there.

I practice my message and get new material by going to NYC tech events. Try to find events that are targeted to your market but emphasize different parts of your market. I can’t say enough for Meetup to help with your search. NYC has several Meetup web groups, some specific to video, marketing, web standards, programming languages, etc. There are also sites that announce weekly events. For NYC, try Garysguide, NextNY’s calendar, and Silicon Alley Insider’s weekly posts.

3. Try it.

Enter Venture is just one way that I try out my ideas. I practice teasing out ideas on my whiteboard and rough site specs for feedback from friends. You can build a local version of your site to practice your coding skills. Open Photoshop, or Gimp and play with some color scheme ideas using tutorials on the web. Sign up to be a software tester at uTest.

4. Analyze.

I’ve been using Google Analytics, Feedburner, and WP Stats to track visitor usage and identify visitor trends. I’m in the midst of using Crazy Egg to better understand usage patterns on the site, which will help drive my next round of Enter Venture updates.

5. Improve.

If you follow #1-4, you should always be improving. Be aware of what you’ve improved on and celebrate it. Be, also, aware of what you need work on and work on it.

Start from #1 again.

(If there are any rock star accountants out there, let me know what you’re up to.)