Business Week has an article featuring Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr:

Fake, center (next to the dog), with the Hunch team.

Getting the Startup Equation Right – BusinessWeek

The Entrepreneur: Caterina Fake, 40

Background: Social media pioneer and co-founder of the photo-sharing service Flickr, she led the technology development group at Yahoo (YHOO) after it acquired her company in 2005. In 2008 she left Yahoo and joined Hunch as co-founder.

The Company: Hunch is a recommendation tool that uses machine learning to harness its users’ knowledge and offer customized answers to their questions. The 12-person business launched the public version of the service in June 2009, had 1.2 million unique monthly users in January, and has raised $6 million in funding.

Her Journal: I have always been very interested in invention and creation and the Great Idea. But the idea is just the starting point, just the first step. You also have to find the right people to help you do it. No successful company has have ever been the product of just one person.

The way the story is told is that Martha Stewart or Steve Jobs or Richard Branson is the sole driver. But that’s because people like to have a protagonist, just as there’s a protagonist in every novel. A group of people makes a bad protagonist. Turning an idea into a company means you have to find brilliant, capable, amazing people and put together a team. [Ed. note: emphasis mine] And then you have to get everybody on board with the Great Idea. And then figure out how to get there.

Putting together a team to help you implement your idea is essential, and quite probably harder than you think. I have put together a couple of teams, and been on some teams, and it is not easy to keep everyone motivated and in the game.

My number one tip for making it work: establish a budget early on and “hire” the team members. The financial incentive works very well. Building a team of entrepreneurs is like herding cats. It takes a lot of time and effort and the cats don’t like it very much!

You might have heard of my friend and blogging consultant, Chris Garrett. He wrote the Problogger book with Darren Rowse.

Well he has a new ebook out that tells you everything you need to know to get quality authority links and a boost in traffic, all through a quick and easy approach to guest blogging.

Right now he is offering it for the crazy low introductory price of only $7! This price is sure to go up within days as the reviews and testimonials start to pour in, so make sure you grab your copy and check out all the bonuses fast.

Check it out here: Guest Posting Workbook

Back in December of 2008 I put this post together “2009 and Beyond – Threats and Opportunities”

I have been a subscriber to The Future of Work newsletter for a year or so, and Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham are definitely two of the most astute observers of what is happening in this rapidly changing world. The most recent newsletter has a couple of articles that bear further review, and I will share some of that with you this week.

As we move into the new year, many of us in the Social Media field have been making some predictions about the marketplace. Ware and Grantham have gone a step further and made some predictions about the global economy and political landscape. See The Virtues of Near Death for some remarkable observations:

In our very humble opinion, the next several years will bring a number of near-death experiences to many businesses, public agencies, and, yes, even sovereign nations. And we’re sorry to say that some of those near-deaths will result in actual extinctions. Not every corporate dinosaur is going to survive the global cataclysm that we’re facing today.

Being futurists at heart, then, we’d like to close with a few predictions.

We’ve already seen the meltdown in financial services. Look for similar events and patterns in:

* Health care (in the United States)
* Higher education – both public and private
* Transportation – both local and long-distance
* Local municipal governments

It does look like these industries are teetering on the brink of some sort of big, big changes.

Read the whole article at “2009 and Beyond – Threats and Opportunities” and share your thoughts.

Mack Collier, writing at The Viral Garden, has a very informative post about how to get the most out of the blogging “lull” in December:

Use December’s blogging lull to your advantage – The Viral Garden

Here’s five ways to make the most of December’s blogging lull:

1 – Re-evaluate everything. Go back and look at what your blogging results have been for 2009. How did traffic do? Subscribers? Comments? And how did these metrics tie back to your blogging goals? Put your blogging strategy for 2009 on trial, and then tweak it for 2010. Set goals for your blog. But make sure that those goals tie back into your larger focus for your blog.

This is always good advice. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, right? Have you done your measurement? How do you track your traffic and how your readers navigate your site? I use a combination of Sitemeter (the free service)and Google analytics. Sitemeter is great for me because it is much closer to real-time than Google, and I like to keep an eye on my referral logs.

2 – Ramp up content. David Armano advises doing this, using the Holiday vacation to push out as much if not more content than usual, with the thinking being that since many other bloggers are slacking off, your content can more easily be seen. We are going to keep looking for content to share with our networks, and if you keep creating great content while everyone else slacks off, guess whose posts will be shared with my network? Use December to increase your blogging visibility.

This is a no-brainer, but time can be an issue. Like the old saying goes, the best time to plant an orchard is 10 years ago, the best time to prepare for the December lull is earlier in the year. How do you do that? Well, for one thing you can compile your posts on book reviews as you do them, creating an uber-list for gift-giving ideas. And use those Amazon links to generate a little extra money for your own holidays…

3 – Use December to get a blogging jumpstart on 2010. Hey we all want to spend time with friends and family during the Holidays. Work in all forms seems to take a backseat…But if nothing else, use that last week of December to get your content in order to hit the ground running in January. Most people won’t begin to get back into reading blogs regularly until Jan. 4th (a Monday), and this is when many bloggers will begin to get back to writing. Use December to have at least one week’s worth of posts already written for January, so that way first thing on Monday the 4th, you’ve already got fresh content waiting on readers, while many other bloggers are thinking about getting back to writing.

Again, get out your calendars right now and jot yourself some notes for August, September, and October 2010 to write some draft posts that you can complete for that first week of 2011. Getting a head start like this is a real motivator and can help you get a jump on your competition next year. And remember, in the US November 2010 is an election for the Congress, who knows what might happen. Uncertainty will likely be highin January 2011 – think about how your business can capitalize on that.

4 – Experiment. Every year I spend the final week of the year spending time with social sites/tools that I’ve been meaning to try out, but just haven’t had the chance. … December is a great time to examine different tools and see if they work for you to complement your blogging efforts.

If you have done your homework and prepared for your December/January content, then this is a great time to play around with all of those applications that you have been meaning to try. In addition, this is great new content! Blog about your experiments, and create conversations with your readers and social media network about what works and what doesn’t.

5 – Become a commenting superhero. Remember, traffic is going to come to a crawl on many blogs. … If many people aren’t commenting, this is your chance to get noticed. And not just with other readers, but by the bloggers themselves.

Commenting is definitely one of the best network- and traffic-building strategies. It is time-consuming and feels like real work sometimes, but it can also be fun and can pay off in increased traffic for your site, increased credibility and authority for yourself/your company and may even lead to guest-posting offers.

What is your December strategy? It’s not too late to do at least a couple of these activities this year.