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.

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.

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 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 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.)

On every blog and developer checklist, however, I kept hearing about this book, the Pragmatic Progammer by Hunt and Thomas. Recently, I was due for a new technical book and decided I could use an essential guide in the fundamentals. Pragmatic Progammer was the perfect choice.

I started reading this book for two reasons. First, for the developer side of my sweeper practice, I wanted to be efficient with my time, ensuring I would do things the right way, the first time. Second, I foresee a career of working with developers, and it makes sense for me to know what makes a good developer, how developers think.

While reading Pragmatic Programmer, I also realized that many of the lessons were applicable to any job, craft, or career. Use the best tools, be efficient with your time, improve as you go, plan, test, be thorough, etc. These lessons are ubiquitous.

Throughout the book, the authors have sprinkled just these types of career-neutral tips that perfectly summarize the book’s concepts. Rather than explain them all to you, I thought best to try something different and use this post to give you all of Pragmatic Progammer’s 70 tips — for progammers and people, alike:

1. Care About Your Craft
2. Think! About Your Work
3. Provide Options, Don’t Make Lame Excuses
4. Don’t Live with Broken Windows
5. Be a Catalyst for Change
6. Remember the Big Picture
7. Make Quality a Requirements Issue
8. Invest Regularly in Your Knowledge Portfolio
9. Critically Analyze What You Read and Hear
10. It’s Both What You Say and the Way You Say It
11. DRY - Don’t Repeat Yourself
12. Make It Easy to Reuse
13. Eliminate Effects Between Unrelated Things
14. There Are No Final Decisions
15. Use Tracer Bullets to Find the Target
16. Prototype to Learn
17. Program Close to the Problem Domain
18. Estimate to Avoid Surprises
19. Iterate the Schedule with the Code
20. Keep Knowledge in Plain Text
21. Use the Power of Command Shells
22. Use a Single Editor Well
23. Always Use Source Code Control
24. Fix the Problem, Not the Blame
25. Don’t Panic When Debugging
26. “select” Isn’t Broken
27. Don’t Assume It - Prove It
28. Learn a Text Manipulation Language
29. Write Code That Writes Code
30. You Can’t Write Perfect Software
31. Design with Contracts
32. Crash Early
33. Use Assertions to Prevent the Impossible
34. Use Exceptions for the Exception Problems
35. Finish What You Start
36. Minimize Coupling Between Modules
37. Configure, Don’t Integrate
38. Put Abstractions in Cod, Details in Metadata
39. Analyze Workflow to Improve Concurrency
40. Design Using Services
41. Always Design for Concurrency
42. Separate Views from Models
43. Use Blackboards to Coordinate Workflow
44. Don’t Program by Coincidence
45. Estimate the Order of Your Algorithms
46. Test Your Estimates
47. Refactor Early, Refactor Often
48. Design to Test
49. Test Your Software, or Your Users Will
50. Don’t Use Wizard Code You Don’t Understand
51. Don’t Gather Requirements - Dig for Them
52. Work with a User to Think Like a User
53. Abstractions Live Longer than Details
54. Use a Project Glossary
55. Don’t Think Outside the Box — Find the Box
56. Start When You’re Ready
57. Some Things Are Better Done than Described
58. Don’t Be a Slave to Formal Methods
59. Costly Tools Don’t Produce Better Designs
60. Organize Teams Around Functionality
61. Don’t Use Manual Procedures
62. Test Early. Test Often. Test Automatically.
63. Coding Ain’t Done ‘Til All the Test Run
64. Use Saboteurs to Test Your Testing
65. Test State Coverage, Not Code Coverage
66. Find Bugs Once
67. English is Just a Programming Language
68. Build Documentation In, Don’t Bolt It On
69. Gently Exceed Your Users’ Expectations
70. Sign Your Work

The internet’s biggest time problem is that there’s no starting point. It’s the most flexible version of recorded history, but it doesn’t have all of recorded history on it. You can find information on almost any topic in the world, but there’s no beginning and no end. For example, just imagine being a completely new user of the internet. Where would you start?

(I did a funny search on Google as part of my research for this post. I Google’d “how to use the internet,” and there are actually a few results for this. Of course there would be results, but isn’t it funny that someone would have had to know how to use the internet and a search engine in order to find these sites in the first place? I digress…)

The point is, we often talk about how the internet has put the world’s information at our fingertips. We can search to our heart’s desire and find detailed information on a seemingly infinite number of topics. That’s just the point though, isn’t it? We’re always searching.

Before the internet, if I wanted to learn something, I picked up a book and read from page 1 and read it to the end. Compared to a similar process on the internet, I’d start at page 25, then read pages 1-10, a bit of 76, n-1, and then I’d assume I’d read enough.

Our information is fragmented. It’s disjointed in time and sequence. I’ve been working to improve my web development skills and have felt this first hand. There’s no one place for me to start and finish. I find myself reading blog posts about advanced topics before I know the basics. I find information that’s outdated but must rely on intuition and error checking to be sure. Random topics rise to the top of the search pile based on a popular blogger. Who’s to know where this information should fit in time? Where’s page 1?

When you visit a blog, you’re presented with the most recent blog post. I’m not sure a new visitor always wants to read the most recent content. Whenever I find a blog I really like, I try to read a sampling of the earliest posts as well as popular posts. I want to know where the blog started, where it’s gone and how long it’s taken to get there. The archives help a bit, but for my purposes, they’re often ordered backwards each month (including Enter Venture’s archive).

No one’s really figured out how to organize the web this way, but I have the feeling plenty of people would appreciate it if someone started putting a bit of chronology to the web’s information. There’s an enormous opportunity to organize the world’s educational matter this way, but it doesn’t stop there. A chronologically organized archive of the world’s newspapers and history would be pretty swell too.

One of the biggest drivers of the internet’s time problem is the emphasis on NOW. Sites have to deliver fresh content. A users, we’re inundated with up-to-the-second information and are fickle with our attention.

You see this problem manifest itself everywhere. It’s not entirely unique to the web, but news stories last barely a week before there’s a new NOW to focus on. There’s no time to reflect on what happened last week. If you use an RSS reader, you find yourself overwhelmed with articles that have to be read now, else suffer the dreaded Google Reader’s 1,000+ unread items. You have that Twitter account with all of your friends and followers that have your attention. Your Facebook chat window. Friendfeed. Yoono. Gchat. Email. Now. Now. NOW.

That brings up my final issues with the time problem of the internet. It doesn’t represent all of time! Remember those nearly 6 centuries of recorded history prior to the internet? You know, the ones that aren’t on anyone’s Facebook feed? Between then and the internet era, there are a few important things you should know about. Some of this information is worth at least as much of your attention as “Robert Scoble posted a message on Twitter.”

I love what Google is doing with its Books Search Library Project, but it’s just a start. Just imagine what it’d really be like if we had access to all of the world’s information, and if we organized it in a way that suited the way we both made sense of time and navigate the internet. Before the internet, it took a lot of effort to record history. Ideas were condensed and forced to be organized in scrolls, books, and libraries. Only the best ideas rose to the top. It’s not just a time problem, it’s a bit of a sequence problem, a focus problem, and a hubris problem.

What’s that the say about those who forget history? They’re doomed to forg… — sorry, hold on, someone just commented on my wall.

Serial entrepreneurs master the process of creating a business. At a recent NY tech meetup, Kevin Ryan, CEO of AlleyCorp, explained how he built his businesses. He spends several months working with a small team to build the business, then focuses on recruiting and moves quickly to the company board. It doesn’t matter what type of business he’s building. He builds to his process, and by the looks of AlleyCorp’s portfolio, it seems to be working

The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki explains exactly the same sort of process. Just check out the book’s major sections:

• Causation
• Articulation
• Activation
• Proliferation
• Obligation

Figure out what you want to do, how to make meaning. Next, refine your message. Start your business. Grow your business. (As for Obligation, it’s just a great life lesson about how to play nice on your way to the top. It’s a little ‘be the change you hope to see in the world’-ish.)

In 200 or so pages, he explains his process for building a company. Rather than a book though, this reads more like a checklist. Each part of his entrepreneurial process is condensed and mapped out, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find a private checklist similar to Art of the Start stashed away at Alltop headquarters.

This book is great for helping you refine your idea. At the beginning of your entrereneurial journey, the sky’s the limit. You could become anything. Before you can ever get started though, you have to explain your brilliant idea to someone else. Most often, this person’s attention span is the length of a powerpoint slide or two. Art of the Start helps you do this. It teaches you how to build constraints into your process to elicit refinement and creativity.

To show you a little bit of what I mean, I’ve pulled out a few quotes / notes from the book:

• Who has money? How do we get it?
• Describe your business model in 10 words. Pitches should explain your concept in the first minute
• Prove concept, complete design, finish prototype, raise capital, ship testable, break even.
• Clean up your problems or disclose your problems, but never hide your problems.
• The Ideal Board consists of the customer, the geek, a calming influence with experience, a Jerry Maguire with connections, and a tight-ass who pushes for totally legal and ethical practices.
• Find lawyers who are problem solvers, not ones who tell you what you can’t do.
• Create contagion: cool is beautiful, contagious, disruptive
• Product should be easy to understand ‘out of the box’, but have legs. The more you use it, the more you discover
• Create buzz then get ink.
• Make friends with the lower ranks of reporters.
• Allow users to test drive the service, then decide whether to stay or go.

Flipping through the pages of Art of the Start reinforces Kawasaki’s emphasis on process. It reads like a guide or text book full of tables, exercises, images, and well organized paragraphs. Thankfully, the book reads more like a blog than a text book and costs a lot less.

If you take anything away from The Art of the Start, appreciate the devotion to process. Kawasaki has numbered out the steps to starting and growing your business. If you want to learn a repeatable entrepreneurial process, this is a great place for an early entrepreneur to start.

I had actually been waiting for that as a type of milestone. The last time no one visited the site for an entire day was May 10th. I kept writing and watching my visitor statistics in order to keep myself out of the red. I wanted to see how long I could keep the streak going. 113 days later, I’m happy with the results.

I started this blog on April 16th and have been tracking my visitors and subscribers ever since. (On June 9th, I added both Feedburner stats and WordPress stats. For the next Enter Venture stats update, I’ll have more data to compare all three.)

In my Enter Venture Update post from June 9th, I mentioned the most popular posts up to that time:

1. Columbia Venture Community
2. Dealing with Constraints
3. Back up, what the feed are you talking about?

Now, the most popular posts, not including pre-June 9th data, are:

1. Two Ideas for the NY Startup Scene
2. NY Video 2.0
3. Columbia Venture Community
4. Mashable Exhibit Hall - NY Internet Week
5. The value of engineering education

I’ve noticed two popular trends for the blog — events and ideas. Events bring tend to bring in the most traffic, but it’s more fickle. People go to an event, read about the event, and then the event passes on. Ideas tend to bring in lasting users, users that subscribe, users that comment.

Going back to one of my earliest posts, What this blog will be about, the one thing that hasn’t seemed to break the popular posts lists are my book posts (actually, these updates haven’t either). I think this is a case when I’m going to ignore my users though. I like those book posts and hope that they’ll become a better resource when I’ve compiled a bigger, more comprehensive list for early web entrepreneurs.

Check out some of the other things I’ve learned about my readers over the past few months:

Geography:

• 86% US (Largely NY, California, and Massachusetts)
• 3.8% India (Mostly from Hyderabad — what’s up guys?)
• 1.67% Canada
• < 1% from 23 others (significant time spent by users from Germany, Sweden, and Taiwan)

Referred by sites:

• 47% Direct traffic
• 24% Google referrals
• 6% Gmail referrals
• 3% Read Write Web referral

Using the following browsers:

• 62% Firefox
• 24% Internet Explorer
• 14% Safari

Much can be learned from these few tidbits about how I’m gaining traffic, what my users are like, and where they’re coming from. Stay tuned for future Enter Venture developments that will address what I’m going to do with this information. The first goal was to simply get people reading this blog. Next, I’m going to focus on how to grow Enter Venture.

Enjoy your 4th of July.

Visible Measures - Matt Cutler, VP Marketing & Analytics

Visible Measures analyzes the effectiveness of internet video and video advertising to determine how the video is being consumed and spread virally. Their solution is particularly cool in that you can analyze the way people are viewing a video — when they’re rewinding, when they’re navigating away, pausing, etc. For example, in this video of Kobe jumping over a car, they can track the precise part of the video that people end up rewinding to watch again. (The jumping over the car part, obviously). I can see how valuable this information would be for marketers, especially for those videos without the obvious ‘jumping over a car’ rewind section.

Boxee - Gidon, Co-founder

Update: I’ve received my alpha invite — thanks guys!

Boxee’s product looks awesome. Before I talk about their presentation, if you guys are listening out there, hook a brother up with an alpha invite!

Boxee is a social networking digital media center for the Mac (and other platforms soon too). Boxee scans your home network and builds a rich media experience over your digital library with browsing features similar to, but better than Apple TV and iTunes. Boxee imports third party content so you can read more information about your videos, see a pilot, or read lyrics to your songs (super cool — I never know the lyrics to even my favorite songs). You can use a remote (super cool again — maintains the tv media experience). You can invite and follow friends’ libraries (super cool one more time — can we finally realize a free on demand media service with this?). You can tune into your friends’ playlists, import slideshows from Flickr and Picassa. You can zoom in and out of your videos. Better yet, you can extend Boxee even further as seen with their Muxtape example.

Again, guys, if you’re listening, I’d love an alpha invite. I get the impression that I’d have a lot more to say about Boxee with more than a cursory feature review

MediaMerx - Tejpaul Bhatia, Co-founder & CEO

I reviewed Tej and MediaMerx’s service in my original Columbia Venture Community post. My original comments remain the same — great opportunity, great sounding company. For an example of MediaMerx’s service in action, check out videopassport.tv.

Hulu - Kevin McGurn, VP National Sales

Kevin McGurn presented one of the hottest new video sites — Hulu. He talked about Hulu’s focus on really building a site that highlighted already beautiful video assets using simple design and high resolution, high quality video. It’s quickly become the destination for professional videos of your favorite movies and tv shows. I could go on and on about how Hulu seems to have nailed the professional online video site. Just check out their site — your favorite shows are probably already up there.

Move Networks - Bob Bryson, SVP Sales & BD

Move Networks is another company bringing higher quality video distribution to the web. Their focus is on getting the highest quality video to the user, regardless of their connection or local environment. Users with the best connections can get the best video, while users with slower connections get a lower quality video, rather than an interrupted video experience. This sounds like a great solution for content providers — just check out their client list for proof.

Thanks everyone! I’ve included a video of all the great presenters thanks to Yaron and Blip.tv! This is a Meetup group I’ll definitely be visiting again, and next time, I’ll be sure to stay for a drink afterwards.