Congratulations go to Gary Vaynerchuk for the Unofficial Best TWiST Guest 2009!!!

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Please click the “Retweet” button to help spread the word about the poll.

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First and foremost, I would like to congratulate Jason and his wife for the birth of their daughter London Athena Calacanis (Dec. 8th, 7lbs. 11oz.).  Coming from a father of two, your life will never be the same!

Jason and crew have been busy lately at “This Week in STartups” we welcome not only one new sponsor to the community but two.  PowerVPS and Bing have decided to join Jason and help him support the startup community.  I think we can all agree that his advice to all entrepreneurs is invaluable, so I would like to thank and all the sponsors (DNAMail, WebSpy & Ustream including NewTek and Data Robotics) for helping to make the show a reality.

To add some excitement to the mix, PowerVPS has stepped up big time to support the fans of TWiST.  They are offering a very generous discount 25% to all fans (just use the code “twist” when signing up).  In addition to the discount they are also offering for 5 lucky fans that tweet about @PowerVPS free VPS hosting for life, so let’s get tweeting (don’t forget include @PowerVPS and #TWiST)

About PowerVPS

PowerVPS is a wholly owned brand of Virtacore Systems, Inc and is an industry-leading privately owned, profitable Web infrastructure service provider based in Ashburn, Virginia. We are hosting experts focused on virtualization and cloud hosting solutions for start-up companies, web hosting resellers, and others looking to build an online web presence. With over eight years of virtualization experience and 10,000 virtual servers deployed, we have the background and expertise to do what it takes to provide the fastest, most stable, and secure environment possible for our customers.

Our Mission

To help businesses of all sizes and types leverage virtualization technology to lower costs and improve IT efficiency.

Our Values

Honesty and Trust: We believe strongly in honesty and trust, we are open and transparent with customers

• We do not claim to own the datacenter we use when many do claim this when they don’t
• We provide monthly statistics on how customers rate our support
• We do own our servers. We are not resellers
• We do own the software we use
• We do have 24/7 support staff
• We do not oversell

Communication: We believe in keeping customers informed about any changes that may impact them. Software updates, server reboots and similar are all communicated to customers with as much notice as possible. We also listen to any comments or suggestions you may have.

Quality: We believe that the only way we can provide a quality service is to use quality products and have trained staff. We choose suppliers with care and ensure we have the right backup and support from each one.

Partnerships: Vital to our success and yours is our partnerships and the level of integration we can achieve with our suppliers. Wherever possible we try and build long term partnerships with our suppliers.

What is VPS? Virtual Private Servers (also known as VPS or Cloud Servers) are the most advanced step in server virtualization technology. They are used to partition a single physical server into many isolated Cloud servers. Each Cloud server looks and behaves exactly like a real networked server system, complete with its own set of init scripts, users, processes, filesystems, etc.

Please check back, I have fallen behind a tiny bit with recapping the “Ask Jason” and “Shark Tank” segments but hope to catch up soon.

side note: If anyone from PowerVPS reads this we are practically neighbors, I live just outside Winchester, VA. it is nice to know that a local company supports TWiST.

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In honor of Black Friday and the upcoming holiday madness, I thought why not add some holiday fun.  Enjoy Jason and Tyler duking it out with “the haters”.

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As I write this, Jason’s cease and desist ultimatum on startups having to pay to pitch their idea to angel investors has less than a day before it expires, what will happen?  So far at Keiretsu Forum I see no changes on the homepage regarding having to pay or not, I checked the press page no changes there since 2007, I guess we are in a time warp.

It appears like Jason will continue on his quest to halt the “pay to pitch” practice going on with some Angel Forum groups.  Here is a bit of evidence, he is starting to brand his own group.  Open Angel Forum (tweet) and a few responses: (click to see a larger image)

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

I guess we will have to stay tuned to see how this develops, I will keep you posted.  In the mean time which logo do you like?

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One of the main requests I get when communicating with entrepreneurs is, do you know someone with site development expertise. We all learned how Joe Essenfeld of LocalBacon found Jason Roberts (for those who don’t, Jason Roberts was an “Ask Jason” caller and Joe searched him out) I was wondering what you all think is the best way to connect?  I know a few groups exist on LinkedIn and I have seen a few sites trying to build a community.  Has anyone had any luck using a site?  If so which?

JT a recent caller of “Ask Jason” asked me to pass on this request:

I’m looking for a CTO/Cofounder who is interested in collaborating with me on the launch of an innovative and comprehensive solution involving selective/educational crowdsourcing to assist companies from small mom & pop’s and the prefunded to the Fortune 500 in regards to their branding initiatives.  This isn’t a rehash of crowdspring.com or 99designs.com.  It will focus on an extremely neglected area of the market with a niche focus near term and more holistic applications as this platform gains traction.  I’m looking for a partner with great technical and developmental expertise who is capable of managing this project from alpha to launch.  If you’re interested please feel free to contact me at http://scr.im/thought.

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I have been working with JT (yes, the one and only “Get Off The Bitch Train” caller) on a few different TWiST Twitter Lists.  We have been trying to nail down some of the John Doe’s that didn’t share their last name, so if you are one of them please send me your name and the episode you participated in.  We have a couple different lists going, so please feel free to decide which best suits your needs.

This list has all the in show guests and all the normal personalities

This list has all the in show guests and all personalities (including fill-ins)

This list has just the in-show guest

this list has just the cast and crew

This is a list of all call-in and Twitter participants (Ask Jason, Shark Tank, Homework and people whose question Jason chose from Twitter)

This is a list of TWiST Fans who have asked to be placed on the list (if you would like to be added send me and @ScottSimko request)

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This is a cut and paste from Jason’s private email list  (sign-up) and thought you may think it interesting.

Team Jason,

Not sure if you read Rupert Murdoch’s comments today that Newscorp
will probably block the Google search spider from indexing their news
sites soon. Essentially this means that you would no longer see the
Wall Street Journal in Google results. Sounds crazy huh? Suspend
disbelief for a moment please because it’s actually genius and it’s
actually worked already (in Korea!).

In fact, a couple of weeks ago we had this *exact* discussion on This
Week in Startups. Essentially, I put forth a simple strategy for
Microsoft to pursue with Bing in which they would go to content
providers like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal and offer
them 50% more revenue then they are currently getting from Google
search referrals to be exclusively indexed in Bing.

This is 100% legal and, in fact, Google encourages people who don’t
like how they do business to opt out of the Google index (they can do
that because they are so huge and because they don’t like to be evil).

So, for a moment, imagine a world where Bing could say in their TV commercials:

“Want to search the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and
3,894 other newspapers and magazine?”

“Well, then don’t go to Google because they don’t have them!”

“Go to Bing, home of quality content you can trust!”

Here are the two Video’s:

Rupert Murdock at Sky News (Nov. 6, 2009)

Jason two weeks ago (Oct. 26, 2009)with Gary Vaynerchuk:

Questions
===============
a) If 1,000 major publications pursued this strategy, would it work?
b) If you would only search the top 1,000 newspapers and magazines on
Bing, would you use it? How often?
c) What is the percentage chance this will happen (I need a #), and why?

all the best,

Jason
http://www.twitter.com

PS: You can subscribe to This Week in Startups with iTunes at the
following two URLs:

This Week in Startups audio: http://www.bit.ly/twistaudio
This Week in Startups audio: http://www.bit.ly/twistvideo

If you like the show please consider writing a review at those two
links at iTunes. It really helps when you guys write a review.

Disclaimer 1: Newscorp is an investor in Mahalo.
Disclaimer 2: I haven’t spoken to Mr. Murdoch about this strategy.

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This Friday’s show (Nov. 6th) will be rescheduled, Jason will be in NY at The Audience Conference doing his last public speech.  The show will air Wednesday the 11th 5pm Pacific.  That is 6pm Mountain, 7pm central and 8pm east coast and 10pm London.

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Please link to the following address on YouTube for the below video

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