Entrepreneur Steve Blank has spent a lot of time thinking (and writing) about how ineffective old-fashioned board meetings are when it comes to building and scaling startups.

This is the Internet age, yet founders and investors are still waiting six weeks to discuss progress over a long mahogany table? Startups aren’t small versions of large, slow-moving corporations. So why, Blank asks, do we treat still them that way?

The question was on his mind this spring, when Blank met with coder, entrepreneur and founder of Techcofounder Ben Mappen. Mappen came to pitch Blank an idea for a startup. But by the time the check arrived, Blank, one the biggest names in the lean startup movement was pitching Mappen on his vision for offering startups a more efficient, productive way to direct and measure their search for a profitable business model.

“The minute I heard his idea, I thought ‘Wow. Not only is this a great idea but this is really right up my alley,” Mappen said. “I asked him if he was doing anything with it and he said no. So he gave me his blessing. Driving home from that meeting I was like, ‘Holy cr** what just happened? I’m working with one of my heroes.” Mappen put his own idea on hold.

The result of that lunch meeting is LeanLaunchLab — a startup-building software based on lean startup principles and the customer development method of searching for a business model.

The blog-like software will allow startups to instantly record their progress and issues and serve as a narrative by allowing them to post customer interviews, surveys, videos and prototypes. Board members, investors, advisers and others will be able to view the project and add their input instantly. No need to wait for board meetings or coffee shop get-togethers.

“It’s a tool that completely shortens the feedback loop,” Mappen said. “Founders wish investors spent more time with them and shockingly, the investors I’ve surveyed feel they aren’t doing enough for their companies. The number one reason is lack of time. They don’t have time to for all the coffee meetings and phone calls and board meetings. Now, they can give advice on their own time. One hour a week per company is all it takes.”

The product has received seed funding from Shawn Carolan of Menlo Ventures. More than 700 startups signed up to participate after it was first demoed in May at the Startup Lessons Learned conference in San Francisco. Now, Mappen is about to launch a beta version of the software, with an initial group of 20 early-stage companies to serve as participants.

While Mappen sees LeanLaunchLab as providing founders with a way to communicate complex information and get feedback and guidance for startups in between board meetings, he believes the product could really be revolutionary for early-stage and angel-funded startups — which typically don’t have formal boards or directors — as well as companies outside the tech orbs of Silicon Valley or New York City. For them, there’s no formal way to get advice and no great way for advisers, investors and potential advisers to actually see what progress the startups are making. Even those valuable Starbucks meetings are impossible.

“In places like Pittsburgh and Anchorage, [the] founders are no less smart. They’re no less passionate. They just have no access to capital,” Mappen said.

But for more established, venture-backed startups, Mappen said the boardroom will always have some value.

“We aren’t trying to completely replace the board meetings,” Mappen said. “There are somethings you need to do in a board meeting, like hiring and administrative details. But you shouldn’t have to sit back and rely on them for everything.”

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One of the nation’s most respected policymakers, Summer will both advise the firm and work directly with its portfolio companies — from Foursquare to Rockmelt -— as they seek to restructure existing markets and expand globally.

“Companies today tend to want to operate globally, much more so than 10 or 15 years ago in both the developed and developing world,” said firm co-founder Marc Andreessen.”We are fortunate enough to be working with companies that are seeking to transform individual markets here and abroad in telecommunications, advertising, entertainment, real estate  and health care. And Larry’s deep insight into global economics and geopolitics will be highly useful.”

Summers was director of the National Economic Council under President Obama, and before that, president of Harvard University and President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary. This is the second high-profile Silicon Valley job Summer has taken on since saying goodbye to Washington D.C. in late 2010. Just last week, Summers announced he’d joined the board of directors at mobile payment company Square, which just today received a $100 million boost.

So why  is he doing this, exactly?

For Summers, it’s all about being where the action is. ”Anybody who studies the American economy when the history of our times written, technology and what’s going on here right now its going to be the major story,” he said. But Summers isn’t trading in his New England tweed for Silicon Valley hoodies; he’ll stay Boston-based. Though, ” judging by all the emails I’ve been getting from Marc every night before bed, I feel virtually present,” in the Silicon Valley, he said.

Speaking with Summers over the phone this afternoon, I couldn’t help but ask the economist to weigh in on all the bubble talk in social media. Ever the politician, he started by expressing total confidence with his new employer’s “financial prudence” in all  investments. As for the industry as a whole, he was a bit non-committal, but erred on the side of “no bubble.”

“Some of the statements that are made conjuring up images of the late 1990s rather misleading,” he said. Most importantly, the scale, intensity and magnitude of Internet connection had changed so much since the days of Pets.com, he said. ”I’m surprised when people treat it as an obvious judgment of bubbles in what’s present today,” he said. “But I’ve seen too much to ever preclude possibilities.”

After all, the four most dangerous words in venture capital, he says are: “It’s different this time.”

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Heroku CEO Byron Sebastian says his strategy involves making sure all the Fortune 500 companies know that their friends — from Disney and Toyota to Dunkin’ Donuts and Avon — are already doing it.

“We want them to say, ‘my peers are using PaaS, and because these guys are all creating social mobile experiences for their customers, I should as well,” he said. ”They aren’t going into risky territory. It’s about getting success examples out,” Sebastian said during a fireside chat with Om Malik and Derrick Harris today during GigaOM’s Structure.

One of the most trailblazing users of PaaS happens to be the Japanese Post — the postal service of Japan. “When you think conservative, I can’t think of anything more conservative than that,” Sebastian says, making the point that transferring major operations to the cloud doesn’t carry the risks some still believe it does.

Heroku, considered the industry’s leading Ruby cloud platform-as-a-service provider, was acquired by Salesforce six months ago. Discussing the run up to the acquisition, Sebastian said that once he and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff quickly bonded over a specific shared enemy.

“We hate servers. We hate server instances. We don’t think customers should have to worry about infrastructure at all. They shouldn’t be in the business of managing servers,” he said. “We both had a vision for a new operation model for applications and a focus on social and mobile.”

Still, Sebastian recognizes that Salesforce and Heroku are different brands with different missions.

Heroku is a developer-focused platform that specializes in fast,flexible and open-source apps. The company is focused on creating a rich developer productivity experience and will remain committed to that, he said.

There are currently 150,000 apps running on top of Heroku. Sebastian said joining the Salesforce fold has opened up the company to new opportunities. Since joining, he’s talked to at least 30 CIO’s and other executives of Fortune 500 companies interested in the cloud.

“The combination has been very synergistic. What I found is customers and CIO’s coming to Salesforce and working with them and ‘where do I start?.” he said. “They want to know how they should be adopting the cloud.

“We have a number of different solutions, applications, the Chatter network — but when it comes to platforms we need a full breadth of offerings,” he said.

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“We see data taking its rightful place as another platform inside enterprise,” Michael said.

Michael was on hand to present the Accenture Technology Vision 2011, a cross-industry research project that takes stock of the evolving trends in IT and how they will impact business and society as a whole. The research team looked into 400 hypotheses based on input from scientists, architects and engineers. They found fifty that held true, which they consolidated into eight trends:

• Data takes its rightful place as a platform.
• Analytics is driving a discontinuous evolution from business intelligence.
• Cloud computing will create more value higher up the stack.
• Architecture will shift from server-centric to service-centric.
• IT security will respond rapidly, progressively—and in proportion.
• Data privacy will adopt a risk-based approach.
• Social platforms will emerge as a new source of business intelligence.
• User experience is what matters.

During his presentation, Michael underscored the idea that data in the cloud has all sorts of different shelf lives, with some information only useful for minutes. “Distributed data is rapidly becoming the new normal,” he said.

He also emphasized the idea that cloud computing will create more value higher up the stack.

“We look at the cloud and notice it’s time for a new convergence away from infrastructure as a service to value coming from the cloud as we move higher up the stack,” he said. ”Cloud will have its real impact in areas such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS).”

Finally, he said consumers are diving the major evolution in IT trends like never before.

“Technology is back on the agenda from a point of innovation and growth,” he said. “We are entering a new reality where consumers are more demanding through the emergence of technology. And the way in which we make decisions based in enterprise is changing based on analytic power of these new platforms.”

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On Wednesday, Sequoia Capital’s Michael Goguen noted the renewed interest in this space during a panel at GigaOM’s Structure conference: “To me, being a guy investing in infrastructure for 15 years, it’s an exciting time for the first time in a while,” he said. “There was a period where there wasn’t a whole lot going on. Architecture was stable, and big vendors dominated.” But now, the emergence of the cloud has caught big vendors “rather flat-footed,” he said. “There are a whole lot of holes to fill and room for startups.”

Ubiquiti, based in San Jose, Calif., hopes to fill some of those holes. The company filed paperwork last week with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering and is looking to raise up to $200 million. Details are scant. The company hasn’t revealed information on stock price or timing, saying only in its S-1 filing that the funds would be used to bulk-up working capital and “general corporate purposes.”

Ubiquiti is focused on providing wireless-networking solutions in under-served areas, such as emerging markets. Its products include radios, antennas and management tools that have been designed to deliver carrier class performance for wireless networking.

The news of the filing comes the same week the National Venture Capital Association and Deloitte & Touche LLP put out a global survey showing VCs the world over believe the level of IPOs is too low to support the industry. But perception and reality can be two different things, Goguen said.

“In the last six months, there have been 33 technology companies going public for a total of more than $16 billion in exits,” he said. “Things are clearly picking up.” It’s still too soon to tell how things will pan out, especially considering that the results of the two most recent IPOs are mixed. While Fusion is exceeding expectations on the open market, Boingo’s stock price has dropped 40 percent since its opening.

Image courtesy of Flickr user indichick7.

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Enter the cloud. The popularity of easy-install applications and the increasingly blurry line between consumer and enterprise products has changed the game entirely.

“For me, its all about the sneak attack,” said Michael Goguen, a partner at Sequoia Capital, who funded Dropbox, a company that went from consumer to enterprise without ever making a sales cold call. Satish Dharmaraj, a partner at Redpoint Ventures, talked about the strategy of entering a company by selling directly to the customers themselves. “All of a sudden ten percent of the office is already using it so the IT manager buys it,” he says.

Goguen and Dharmaraj were among an all-star group of VC’s gathered at Structure on Wednesday to discuss how the cloud has changed their investment strategies.
The group discussed how the cloud is changing what they’re investing in and what areas of technology entrepreneurs should focus.

Ping Li, a partner at Accel Partners, pointed to opportunities in mobile web. “IOS and Android are just getting started in a meaningful way in enterprise,” he said. “That’s all going to be powered by cloud infrastructure.”

John Vrionis, the managing director of Lightspeed Venture Partners, sees opportunities everywhere from big data to network virtualization. “There is opportunity up and down the stack,” he said. “This is a great time to start a company.”
So what kind of companies should they bring to pitch meetings with these guys? According to Dharmaria: “Money makers.”
Though that was (mostly) a joke, Goguen says he is seeing more early-stage companies come to his office generating profit than ever before. He attributes this all to the cloud. “You can spin up companies much more quickly,” he said.

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Casares couldn’t foresee a time where things would get any easier outside the United States. “If you had told me back then, I would have had a very hard time believing you,” he said. “The leapfrog in terms of connectivity has been impressive.”

Here in the United States, cloud computing has allowed emerging companies to build much faster and much cheaper. But in Latin America, the development of the cloud has been nothing short of transformative. And developments are moving rapidly. Last year, Brazil experienced its fastest economic growth in almost two decades. Gross domestic product expansion was double what economists had expected the country to reach.

“It is really leveling the playing field. I was surprised to see them take to the cloud even faster than here [in the US],” Casares says.

Casares and Rich Lechner, IBM’s vice president of cloud and services marketing, discussed the opportunity for cloud services in Latin America this morning during GigaOM’s Structure conference.

While the region has been behind the United States in terms of technology and internet infrastructure, that might actually be an advantage when it comes to deploying the cloud now. “They don’t have as much of a legacy infrastructure to contend with. It’s existing in some areas and not in others. You can deploy it where it exists an provide across the region,” Lechner said.

There are big opportunities for US companies in countries like Brazil, where local cloud services are just starting to materialize. IBM has one of its six global data centers in Sao Paulo as well as two cloud innovation and security centers.

But there are still challenges to overcome, even in Brazil. Speed isn’t universally available. Broadband access is very spotty. “It’s faster and cheaper than in U.S. in some places but the fiber might not make it down the road. It looks like here five years ago,” Casares said. Still, the deployment of the cloud is pushing the extension of broadband services.

Overall, Casares  is confident. ”They are building infrastructure remarkably fast,” he said. “What used to take 10 years in now being done in 12-18 months.”

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“I’m moving away from this picture of a stack with infrastructure on the bottom and platform on top. It’s outdated,” he said. “Most of the Amazon cloud is much more than services.”

Instead, the cloud — and Amazon Web Services — is about pulling together services from a million different ecosystems that allow enterprise customers to build highly sophisticated applications. And while much of the enterprise world says they are buying instead of building, they are actually building too, he says. They just aren’t starting from scratch.

Both Oracle and SAP are now certified for software production on the AWS cloud, allowing businesses to build their own very sophisticated solutions using “standard, off the shelf” pieces from across different providers, he said.

Vogels was on hand to discuss where Amazon sees cloud computing and where he plans to take the industry next. Vogels helped elevate the cloud computing industry into the mainstream when his team at Amazon launched EC2 and S3.

The Amazon public cloud accounts for an estimated 40 percent of the total public cloud market. And Vogels said the number of objects on AWS has more than doubled in the last year, from 150 billion to over 339 billion objects. And that’s just the beginning. “On a daily basis we are adding as much capacity as Amazon retailer used in year 2000,” he said.

Looking back to the early days of AWS, Vogels said the original mission was to enable businesses and developers to build scalable, sophisticated applications. So how did that pan out?

“Predicting the world of now has been really hard. But if I look back some has come through,” he said. “Both developers and businesses are building increasingly sophisticated applications in the cloud.” He said the cloud has allowed young businesses to become extremely fault tolerant.

Vogel also pointed to expanding geographies in Amazon’s cloud network. AWS now operates in five regions and recently launched in the Singapore and Tokyo regions.

He said within the next year, AWS will focus on making governance, billing and user-management easier, as well as offering customers “more detail and more choice.”

Asked to make a ten-year prediction for the cloud, Vogels said it just wasn’t possible.

“Almost on a yearly basis we see ‘cloud’ evolving more. We definitely see customers building more and more sophisticated applications,” he said. “As such it is still day one. There is a lot of work to be done.”

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More than 80 percent of the 347 VC’s surveyed for the 2011 Global Venture Capital Survey said current IPO activity levels in their home countries aren’t sufficient to support the health of the market. In the United States, an overwhelming 87 percent of U.S. venture capitalists surveyed believe that the current level of IPO activity is too low.

“That’s a huge consensus for venture capitalists, said Mark Jensen, national managing partner for venture capital services at Deloitte & Touche LLP, which co-sponsored the survey along with the National Venture Capital Association. “You can’t get these guys to agree on a turkey sandwich for lunch.”

The global survey is a snapshot of the perceptions and opinions of venture capitalists from nine countries, and reflects feelings more than actual figures. And the snapshot comes with one large caveat. The questions were distributed to VC’s back in the spring, before the recent spate of high-profile social media IPOs and media speculation about possible tech bubbles. Meanwhile, all indications point to 2011 being a decent year for going public. There have been 75 IPO’s in the U.S. this year— that’s a 27 percent increase over last June. And the technology sector has seen 29 companies go public this year. That’s more than any other sector, according to data from Renaissance Capital.

Not surprisingly, in the U.S., where there has been an active VC and entrepreneurial community for many years, 91 percent of venture capitalists deemed the domestic IPO market to be a critical element of the venture capital industry. Yet,  in contrast to the global trend, only 36 percent of domestic venture capitalists said that IPO markets in other countries were essential to the success of the U.S. industry.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of venture capitalists in all nine countries surveyed still look to the U.S. exchanges to provide a healthy and vibrant market. Globally, 87 percent of respondents selected NASDAQ as one of the three most promising stock exchanges for venture-backed IPOs; 39 percent selected the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), and 33 percent cited the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

Overall, VC’s in different parts of the world attributed the  slowdown in IPO activity to several key drivers, from the lack of a competitive investment banking community (50 percent in Germany) to a lack of freely available capital (43 percent in the UK). But 83 percent of all VC’s pegged the biggest culprit as the lack of  ”appetite for equity in public companies.”

Jensen attributes this belief to the investment preferences behind large pension funds and endowments.

“They don’t want to invest $50 million in a $300 million company. They want to put $300 million in a $5 billion company. Those are difficult investments to come by. It’s the smaller $200 million to $300 million IPO’s that are disappearing. And these are the concerns that are being reflected in the survey results,” he  said.

Meanwhile, a handful high-profile IPOs in social media could blur a larger problem, Jensen said.

“It’s equally important that these smaller companies are able to go. We start to run the risk of saying ‘gee we are starting to turn the corner’. But you have to take another look at it. There are whole bunch of companies in other industries that no one is paying attention to. These companies without an ability to go public are stranded and wind up being acquired. In then, technologies gets swallowed up and the founders move on. Those are the fears.”

Photo Courtesy of Flickr’s Rob Lee.

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DealsGoRound is unveiling a digital wallet feature today that lets daily deal users easily manage all those sky-diving lessons, sensory-deprivation-chamber sessions and Brazilian hair treatments they’ve purchased —all in one place.

The free Deal Wallet (available today for the web with mobile versions to follow) is a central storehouse for the vouchers you’ve already purchased on Groupon, LivingSocial  or any of the nation’s estimated 521 daily deal sites. Every week, users receive an email update listing the status of every deal they’ve purchased and, most important, when it expires. And if time is running out to redeem that dinner cruise or you’ve lost the ambition to rock climb?  With one click the deal can be  listed for sale on DealsGoRound marketplace

“Our users end up buying deals from so many different places and there is no real organizational piece to their madness,” says Kris Petersen, founder and CEO of the Chicago-based secondary marketplace for daily deals. ”Basically, this service is like Mint for daily deals. We’re saying ‘Give us the credentials and we more of less suck it all in to one universal organizer.’ We will notify them of what their inventory is.”

Launched in early 2010, DealsGoRound received Series-A funding from Lightbank, the investment firm created by Groupon co-founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky. The company would not disclose its total funding, saying only that it is “under $1 million.”

DealsGoRound was born out of an unfortunate Segway incident. Peterson had purchased four tickets to tour Chicago on the electric contraptions. He was confident his wife and two friends would fall in line and agree to zip along the city with him. But his loved ones weren’t as psyched as he thought they’d be.

“I was out $180 and thought there has to be a better way,” he said, “I still want to go on that Segway.”

The secondary daily deal marketplace is a large, and largely untapped market. While consumer spending for daily deal sites is expected to exceed $1.25 billion this year, more than one in five  deals go unredeemed, according to a recent study by Rice University.

Meanwhile, the secondary-marketplace model has already proved successful in the gift card market, where sites like Plastic Jungle let customers buy, sell and trade unwanted gift cards before they expire. An estimated 6-8 percent of gift cards go unredeemed each year, according to statistics from Plastic Jungle.

Of course, we all have our own special ways of managing those discounted skydiving lessons and mud facials we’ve been buying. While the most type-A personalities among us use Excel spreadsheets organized by expiration date, the more laid-back approach has typically included entering your credit card information and then promptly forgetting all about the osso buco for two you just bought until a month after the deal has ended and the Italian restaurant you bought it from has turned into a yogurt shop.

And while some DealsGoRound sellers hawk their deals because of buyers regret, Peterson says most sell because they simply run out of time. “We are very optimistic when are making these purchases,” he says.  So is he worried his deal wallet will cannibalize his popular re-selling site. After all, if everyone knows when their deal is going to expire, they won’t get stuck and frantically need to sell.

The short answer. No.

“I’m really not too worried, If we get enough users, the money will follow,” Peterson says.

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