Everyone on my team at Fetchback did this exercise last year as well as this year and really liked it. Instead of selecting specific resolutions for the year, choose 3 guiding words or phrases. I was introduced to this concept by reading a post from business blogger, Chris Brogan. My 3 words even made it into his blog post this year! Read Chris Brogan’s 3 words for 2012.

Here are my 3 words for 2012 and reasons why I chose them:

+200%
I learned a lot in 2011 about retargeting, being a manager, business, and lots of other things. To hit my long-term goals and be fulfilled, I can’t get complacent. I want to learn twice as much in 2012 as I did in 2011.

Iterate
I’m going to continue to embrace change and double-down on what’s working while removing what’s not at Fetchback and in my personal life, as fast as makes sense.

Reflect
If iteration is the action, reflection is what will help ensure I make the right changes in a timely manner, both personally and professionally. Annually and Quarterly are not often enough. In a startup environment like Fetchback, every day is a marathon and we cover a lot of ground. For many goals, weekly or daily reflection is needed. Taking the time to stop for a moment and think about what you recently learned also helps solidify it for you.

If you would like to participate, throw your 3 words in the comments. I also recommend writing your 3 words on a note-card and display it in a spot where you will see it every day!

Going viral is no longer an option — for many businesses it’s a requirement. More and more companies are shifting from physical to virtual entities. While people have debated whether this is a good or bad thing, this shift has brought a vast array of useful, cloud-based tools for entrepreneurs. From online fax to finances, there are now plenty of online services that can help you make your business more efficient. So what are you waiting for? Try out these online business tools.

1. Collaboration

As a CEO of a small-business, you may have to forego office space in the beginning phases of company development. However, these online communication services can help you stay in touch, regardless of geographic distance.

In-Company Communication

• Campfire: Offers private chat rooms, through which you can invite clients or employees
• GoogleDocs and ConceptShare: Share or comment on documents
• Skype: Free video chats and low-cost calls to landline and cell phones, easy open communication

Call Services

• RingCentral Fax: Provides online fax services, through which you can send faxes for free from home without interrupting your phone line
• GoogleVoice: Allows you to get low rates for international calls, and gives you one number for all of your phones with a single voicemail box
• NewVoiceMedia: Contact center solutions including call routing and CRM

2.  Organization

Juggling all the elements of a business can be enough to make a person go insane. Lucky for you, there are plenty of online services that help you tackle this difficult task.

Calendars and Planners

• GoogleCalendar: Calendar tool
• Skedgeme: Scheduling, allows you to accept/make appointments, and customers can see services and book online

File Backup

• Carbonite and IDrive: Offer unlimited backup plans at affordable prices, and allows you to access your information from mobile devices
• Box.net: Backup and collaboration at affordable prices for monthly plans
• DropBox: Allows the sharing/storage of large files

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

• Highrise: Helps keep track of customers, contact and communication history
• Commence: Quote based cost, has one system for sales, marketing and customer service

3.  Finances

It’s always good to utilize a program that will organize all your transactions, assets, and finances. These programs can help you do just that.

• Dimewise or Wesabe: Record transactions
• Prosper: Allows you to get loans from either a single person or many individuals

Thanks to online services, maintaining a business has never been easier. Access everything you need from your computer or, if your on-the-move, from your mobile device with cloud computing services.

Instead of setting yourself up for failure in 2011, steal a concept from blogger Chris Brogan and come up with 3 focus areas for the year. These don’t have to be specific actions or smart goals, just words to guide you throughout the year.

I chose Lead, Brand, Execute.

Why did I select these words to guide me through this year? I recently moved into a new management position at work and want to be the best leader and mentor possible to my team. I also want to lead the startup revolution in this world with my contributions through StartupRoundup and other projects.

I also want to continue creating a reputation for myself, a brand if you will. This mostly consists of networking and trying to bring to light all this things I work so hard on in a non-egotistical way. If you can’t toot your own horn, no one else will, and therefore, no one else will know of your great acomplishments. My current networking strategy is to participate in the conversation about business and startups though my blog posts as well as being more active on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.

Finally, all ideas are worthless without execution. There is no shortage for project and startup ideas out there. Big or small, none of them will get off the ground and see the light of day without proper execution and follow-through.

What 3 words or phrases best describe what you want to accomplish this year? Write them down on your whiteboard or somewhere else you can see them everyday and use them to guide you to success in 2011!

Since my goal is to help these startups, the StartupRoundup blog is going to begin sharing the details of business plan and other startup compititions where seed money is available. On top of that, I would like to follow up with the winners and/or the most interesting startups as these events and share their story.

In my continuing quest to help other entrepreneurs, look for a startup competition calendar coming soon that will list as many events as possible. Also, check back on the home page often for details on the most interesting competitions. If you have any suggestions for events to cover, please send them my way on twitter @StartupRoundup or shoot me an email at startup@startuproundup.com

Make 2011 the year of your startup!

Visit the Calling All Innovators site to get more details, such as the different run-time options you can develop it in as well as the official entry form. The deadline is Friday, January 28, 2011 at 5pm Eastern Time.

To get you started, here is some great app development advise from my interview with the founder of Appiction, Spencer Forrest. He gives a peek into the different ways to separate your app from the rest, Appiction’s unique development process, and the lessons they learned along way.

Looking for some more inspiration? Find out how one college student took his idea for an app called KartMe and made it happen without spending his days programming.

Appiction blends the trinity of smart phone app creation: creative, development and marketing. The Austin-based startup builds native and web apps for entrepreneurs, businesses and interactive advertising and marketing firms. The company’s end to end service don’t just launch apps, they launch app businesses.

I had a chance to interview Spencer Forrest to find out how he was able to create a successful company in what seems like a crowded market. Spencer is an entrepreneur that is able to combine his 20 years of experience in mobile, software deployment, and e-learning to take on one of his toughest challenges yet: creating apps that people will use more than once.

How did Appiction get started?

After years of working in online ventures, and having my ad network business Affiliate Fuel acquired, I was looking for a new project and saw a striking similarity between the rush for the web and the rush for the app market. Companies and entrepreneurs were eager to get into the space but the code language and the store were so young, there weren’t a lot of resources to help them. Appiction started coming together in early 2010 and officially launched in March at SXSW with a large booth but no actual apps in the iTunes or Android markets. Now, six months later, the company boasts a staff of 55, almost half of which are developers located at their Austin, Texas office. The company has put nine apps into the iTunes store and three into the Android Market, for companies including Samsung and Jameson. Austin Texas has been a great place for the company to grow, with a healthy talent base from local universities like UT, a booming tech scene filled with apps including Gowalla, TabbedOut and Qrank and an economic climate where investment and innovation can still happen. The company’s success draws from a few areas, but the comprehensive scoping of apps is an innovative aspect that seals the deal for clients. Before we even write a line of code, a client sees a full wire frame of their app, color graphics showing what it will look like, a review of it’s technical feasibility both immediately and ongoing and market analysis. It’s good for the client, but it’s just as good for us because that level of planning means less mistakes and surprises through the development phase.

What is your target market?

We are a client-based company so in a nutshell, anyone with a big idea or a desire to take their business mobile. More specifically, we partner with startups and entrepreneurs with an enterprising app-based business, we help interactive agencies provide creative branded apps, and help businesses find a way to translate what they do into a mobile app that drives business. It’s hard enough for us to keep abreast of all the constant changes in the mobile industry, we hardly expect our clients to do it too, so our target market it also made of those who are looking for someone who can consult with them and navigate this new space.

What is your business model?

Clients, such as businesses, entrepreneurs and agencies, come to us with their app ideas or mobile needs. Their first step is purchasing a scope, which is effectively a full business plan, wire frame and cost analysis they can present to CEOs, lenders and decision makers. We have a 89% rate of people who move forward after the scope to develop the app, and it’s a number we’re proud of. With select apps, ones where we see potential but know they will need long term updates or marketing to be viable, we choose to partner. We share app revenue with the client and in exchange we advise, help with additional build and apply market strategy. It’s a great way for us to feel ownership of an app and put in 100%. Some of the unique proposition Appiction offers are that almost all of our development is done in house or on-shore, we outsource overseas as little as possible. Also, since we are end-to-end we don’t just hand over a lump of code and wish you the best of luck, we build marketing and long term strategy into every app from its inception.

What type of sales and marketing are you currently doing?

For our own company, we’ve taken a really diverse approach. We use Google Ads to help those people who are just poking around online trying to learn more find us. We’ve established a strong presence at several conferences now including SXSW Interactive, Appnation and The Android BBQ, where we have had booths and thrown parties. Our marketing department makes sure press opportunities are always in front of us and consequently we’ve ended up on UNTETHER.TV, AOL Small Business News and Yahoo Tech News. Lead generation sites such as We Make Apps have delivered us many creative clients and have been a positive tool for us. It’s always a challenge to keep our sales staff as educated as possible, whether they have technical backgrounds or not they need to understand the capabilities of these devices and of apps. We actually call them “App Consultants” because the knowledge they require goes far beyond a person sitting in call center.

What sets you apart from competitors?

Two things: that we are truly end-to-end service and that we partner to forge app businesses. End-to-end service cuts down on the time it takes to make an app, improves the quality and gives consistency through the project. Marketing and design are not mutually exclusive of one another. An apps marketing should be considered from inception, just as the development should be consider alongside the design. When all these departments are in house, working together, the product is just better. With partnerships, the era when you make an app and put it in the store and money rolls in is over, an app is a living piece of work that evolves with user feedback, responds to comments and grows over time. We want to help create those Gowallas and GetGlue and marry their business savvy with our creative and development abilities and create a lifetime plan for the app’s success.

What are some other interesting facts about your startup?

Our office is divided in a sort of left brain, right brain format. We have the Creative Think Tank and the Development Center. Our think tank sports chalk walls covered in the latest art from whatever project we’re working on, our Development Center is stocked with Mountain Dew and white boards covered in UI navigation.

Spec documents are created by teams, and each of our teams in the creative department have a chosen name. Some of them include “White Gold”, “Sweetums”, “Fortress” and “NSFW.”

One of our riskiest and most successful app marketing campaigns to date involved handing over a check to a 16 year old girl. To promote the Dream Closet fashion app we tapped into the 1,000,000 plus fan base of YouTube star Blair Fowler. Within hours of her video the app soared from obscurity to a 3 ranking in the iTunes Lifestyle section and 140 ranking in all paid apps. The influx of people tanked parts of the apps landing page and resulted in unsponsored spin-off YouTube videos.

What other experiences does your management team bring to the table?

We develop a diverse collection of apps so it’s fitting we have a collection of people with diverse backgrounds spanning film, media and tech.

In addition to myself, Appiction is composed of Creative Director Q. Manning, a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design who has a knowledge base that includes print, marketing and film. Sam Griffith leads up Appiction’s development team with 20 years of experience and a is a published author, an adjunct professor and a guru of codes new and old alike. Sam’s back end knowledge, combined with the rest of the development team, allow Appiction to comfortably take on apps with large back ends and server needs. Our marketing director Rachel Youens brings a media and startup background to the company, including work with FOX, Current TV and aiding in the launch of two online startups. Her new media savvy brings a quirky and creative spin to clients’ marketing campaigns.

What lessons learned would you like to share with aspiring entrepreneurs?

For as played out as people like to suggest the app market is, it’s really just a second wave. The era of throwaway apps making money is done, and it will be the apps that are thought-out businesses or have highly creative branding that ever get into a consumers phone. We’ve known this for a long time and it’s why we invested so much in our scoping and design teams so that they help a client draw out a business plan for their app and give it a design that has shelf appeal.

Creative, social marketing works for apps. App discovery is still a huge problem and a lot of people still only find apps by opening up to “top selling” or by asking friends. We try to design apps and marketing campaigns that drive word of mouth sales, whether that mouth be a blog, a YouTube video or just one friend to another.

Be flexible with your billing and development methods depending on the project. We fluctuate between flat rate, SCRUM, waterfall and time and materials billing methods for apps depending on what we think an app needs. It’s not been easy to integrate all these into our work flow but it’s made setting realistic timelines, and then staying on them, much easier

Follow Appiction on Twitter or Facebook to stay current on the latest in mobile app development.

To borrow from the book Rework by the founders of 37signals, “Inspiration is Perishable.” After the initial excitement of a new project wears off, will you have what it takes to keep going and take an idea to the next stage while no one is paying attention to you? Can you complete that prototype so you have something to show to others, begin to get feedback, and recharge your excitement for the project?

Here are 5 ways to battle the single person startup fatigue and get you over that hill to your future adoring fans:

1. Set small goals. Achievable milestones help you gain momentum and re-energize your ambitions as you show forward traction. Be careful not to set to large of a goal, or you will get discouraged. Instead, break you project down into much smaller goals that you can knock out of the park.

2. Find a support community online. There are thousands of people out there just like you that are working on their own startup and also need support or have questions. Find a great place to connect with some of these people and build a comradery as you are down in the trenches together, creating your individual businesses. Entrepreneur Connect as well as OnStartups are two good places to interact with other founders.

3. Chronicle your adventures on a blog or Twitter. People are fascinated with how things work or how they are built. You can gain several followers and fans of your business before you even launch just by telling about what you are doing each step of the way. Did you finally get that server configured how you wanted? Post an article about the effort it took and your recommendations for others based on the experience you had.

4. Connect with a mentor on Linkedin. Start looking around the groups on Linkedin specific to your industry and strike-up a conversation with some of the members. You have the ability to connect with people on Linkedin that you may never have the opportunity to meet in real life. There are people with amazing industry knowledge that are willing to take an interest in your startup.

5. Enjoy the time when no one is watching. Take this time to push the envelope of your startup and create what you want. You can make mistakes and learn from them without effecting a large customer base. You can change features and designs without having a community revolt against your product. Want to explore a different pricing model? Go for it. Change is much harder as you grow.

Stay focused and on track to hit your goals while you are alone in the beginning. Don’t lose your motivation. Don’t just go through the motions. Continue to do the right things while no one is watching and it will payoff in dividends in the future.

But what happens when the unthinkable happens? When there is a glitch in the cloud or you accidentally delete something and are the victim of lost data that cannot be recovered and has floated away. We have seen examples of this such as T-Mobile Sidekick owners losing their contacts, calendars, and photos on the Windows Mobile platform. Just last week, social media giant Facebook, had its worst outage since only having 7 million users. The remedy was to actually temporarily turn off the database for many of the 500 million users.

It’s easy to forget a time not too long ago where we were responsible for backing-up our own data on our computers. This may have meant periodically burning your files onto a DVD or backing them up to an external USB drive you kept in a safe place for your piece of mind. With cloud computing, we give up some control. That philosophy wasn’t accepted by the founders at Backupify. They still wanted the same piece of mind for their social media and online documents that they got from backing up their computer to an external USB drive.

Backupify provides tools to help control and protect cloud data. The most popular product is a Google Apps backup service. Backupify also has the ability to backup 17 online services, including your entire social media life. This is a big differentiating factor compared to other backup services that only integrate to backup part of your online self. Backupify can provide the piece of mind to a veteran of cloud-computing or someone just switching over to cloud services.

The company was founded by Rob May and Vik Chadha in November 2008 thanks to a friend suggesting a backup service for the popular photo sharing site, Flickr. Backupify started in Louisville, KY, but moved to Cambridge, MA earlier this year. Both founders have great backgrounds. Rob has an MBA from the University of Kentucky and blogged on Business Pundit for 5 years until he sold the site in 2008. Vik was previously the co-founder of GlowTouch, one of the Inc 500 fastest growing companies. Backupify recently raised $4.5 Million, bringing its total funding to $5.6M. With only 12 employees and less than $1 Million in annual revenue, the company is positioned for explosive growth over the next 6-12 months.

The backup service can be easily setup with a couple different monthly subscription pricing options. When asked how Backupify is currently being marketed, the standard methods such as SEO, SEM, and social media were given. You can find them having conversations on Twitter: @backupify. They are also on Facebook and Linkedin, as well as a new focus of creating content for YouTube soon. Great time is spent to cultivate a community around the new concept of backing-up the cloud. An additional marketing effort Backupify is employing revolves around a tactic that often times gets ignored by entrepreneurs. The company is working to build channel partnerships with companies such as Omnetic to connect with Google Apps business leads and complete the cloud computing product offering.

When asked what lesson learned would you like to share with aspiring entrepreneurs, Backupify founder Rob May said: “Stay with it.  The hardest thing about a startup is having the discipline to keep going.”

The ability to backup data in the cloud will play a vital roll in persuading many managers and business owners to move their priceless data from current hardware to the virtual cloud. The opportunity for complementing cloud computing services, such as Backupify, has only begun.

To get you started on this challenge of redesigning your Twitter background, I thought I would write a quick tutorial as well as include a Photoshop template.
(Template also works with GIMP – a free Photoshop alternative)

Download the Twitter Background Template

There is now only about 112px of room on the side of the background and 19px on the top.Within the psd template above, make sure you keep everything inside the black area and you should be safe.

1. Main branding on left side of background

If you want to keep your picture and additional contact info on the background to the left of your tweets, you will have to shrink everything down. I recommend making your picture 100px wide so it leaves some margin room.

2. Text across the top

Now that Twitter has a resource bar across the top of the site, putting text at the top of your Twitter background doesn’t look as out of place. Some people may even mistake it for a Twitter status message for a moment, which is long enough to draw their eye to it. For StartupRoundup, I included both the website address and an email address where people can submit their startups to be featured on StartupRoundup.

3. Additional branding/design on the right side of background

This space can be used for a wide variety of things. In the past, creative designers have Photoshopped pictures of themselves peeking around the corner of the Twitter frame so it looks like they are reading their own tweets. The new limit on space may discourage this moving forward, but you can still use that space to your advantage. I put StartupRoundup.com written vertically on the right side.

4. Background color

Then next step is to select a background color. You are more than welcome to keep the black that is in the template, but chances are, you have a specific brand color or website theme color that would be better suited.If you are really talented, feel free to add a design to the background as opposed to a solid color.

5. Retro Twitter Safe

You want to make sure your new background still looks great to users that have not yet adapted the new Twitter look and are still viewing with a narrower Twitter page. Go ahead and make the white Twitter page area of the template match your background. Also, after uploading your background to Twitter, make sure to set your Twitter background color to the same hex color you chose for your template background to ensure it displays correctly on any size monitor.

Final Product

Once you save your background for the web and upload it to Twitter, you will be able to see your masterpiece that incorporates additional branding for your little space of the Twitterverse.

Follow @StartupRoundup on Twitter.

Myra has an outstanding background in software education and has been teaching software since the 80’s. She has been an instructor for Polar Bear Software Company as well as Vancouver Island University (formerly Malaspina College). Myra then researched and designed her own accredited software training company called Everyone’s Computing. This was a brick-and-mortar learning facility that offered courses in bookkeeping, spreadsheets and word processing, HTML, project management software, Photoshop and CorelDraw. After 7 years of running Everyone’s Computing, she decided to travel to London to work at Spring IT Training, then Geometrix in Victoria, B.C., and ultimately landing back in Vancouver at Ventyx. With the econnomic downturn in 2008, there was reorganization at Ventyx and Myra found herself without a job.

It had always been Myra’s passion to run her own company as she did before, but online. At that point, out of both necessity and desire, Everyone’s E-Learning was started with no outside funding. The course is geared at both small business owners trying to learn about web development to cut costs as well as college students that want to broaden their skill-set without the steep University course tuition. The course is marketed through the blog and forums on the website. Myra says that webinars on Dreamweaver have been the most successful at bringing in new students to the course.

Lessons Learned

When asked to share some tips for aspiring entrepreneurs, Myra said “It’s not for the faint of heart!  Try not to be overwhelmed. There are so many aspects of an online business to be taken care of.” She recommends concentrating on one aspect at a time. She first focused on Blog Talk Radio, spending a weekend learning about how best to use this marketing tool. She then moved on to understanding how Twitter and Facebook fit into her overall efforts.

Follow Myra on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.