2. Coffee? Get a good coffee machine, yes it’s a personal thing, but the smell of fresh coffee kick starts the morning for me.

3. Meet standing up. A meeting room is important but not essential. Stand up meetings around a PC are quick and to the point. Try change of scene and meet in the local coffee shop.

4. Look for flexibility. You never know what’s round the corner, keep the lease flexible to allow you to expand or contract as needed. In the current market great lease deals are for the taking, make sure to negotiate on rent and terms.

5. Big office toys are fun, but not essential. Staff most impressed by office toys probably aren’t the staff you need.

6. Use mobile phones, have as few landlines are necessary. In the UK you can get unlimited land line calls on a contract for £30 a month, then add a skype out monthly contract (6 Euros per month) to call worldwide landlines for free (thanks to JasonD for the tip)

7. Location. Think about location but remember its not everything, a dynamic company should be able to attract and retain excellent staff on the back of the business and culture rather than its office.

8. Wireless connectivity. Properly secured wireless is great and saves the need for cables everywhere.

9. Large screens and monitors. We’ve only recently done this, but now everyone has at least 24″ of screen to work with, it just seems to make life easier.

10. Simply entry & security. Keep office access features simple and practical (complex alarms, entry systems, etc tend to need admin time) if you’re small enough to work without these systems, then all the better.

11. Bin clutter ASAP. (I’m terrible at this!) if you haven’t used that stack of CD’s or out of date printer in 6 months find another home for it.

12. Use low tech networks. Low tech networks need low tech support which is cheap, sometimes less is more!

13. Secure your data & backup data off site. Double backup and secure heavily the mission critical stuff.

14. In town office space works. Chances are for a tech start up you’ve got a fairly young team, town centre means the team can arrive by public transport. Also lunch breaks can be used to best effect for people with busy lives.

15. Consider taking space in a shared environment. If you’re on your own, and just getting going, shared office space is a cost effective way to you out of the house (and out of your underpants) and allows you to meet new people in a similar situation for networking and business.

16. See if you local university has office space (Doug of CarRentals used this to great effect), space is normally cheap and flexible, networks are in place and talent is on the door step. The vibe of the university also seems to help.

Release your logo into the air as a bubble with Flogos. Thanks Tim for the link

Project Natal is controller-less game play using body movements to control the Xbox 360 console. In reality if it works out as good as the videos shows then Microsoft have scored a home run.

Digg Ads – Fully Blended

Digg is about to launch an ad system that allows sponsored stories within the Digg listings, spot the ad:

The question is will the Digg community become blind to the sponsored ads? Or will they turn out like a paid inclusion version of Digg? Read the full announcement on the Digg Blog.

Seth on Product Development Buffet Style

Interesting post by Seth using the analogy of a Dinner Buffet to explain how to expand a product range effectively.

Deeper would mean a bacon-focused buffet, a dozen bacon dishes, including chocolate-covered bacon. Deeper would mean a chocolate-obsessed dessert bar, ten cakes, fondue, everything.

Deeper gets you people willing to drive across town to visit you.

The other choice is wider. Instead of adding a handful of dishes that mildly please the people you already have, why not add brown rice and tofu and vegetarian chili?

In summary: Increasing your quality significantly (deeper) or making a new product line to expand (wider) your market size works; Slight improvements in quality keeps your existing clients happy but doesn’t win new ones.

Definitely read the full post at Seth’s blog.

Bing – Video Search

Microsoft recently launched Bing a search engine comparable to Google. The normal search is fine, but where this search really holds it own is video.
A video search results page is a great video wall in which a mouse-over on video gets it playing.

Lets check out what Seth has to say:

Or watch the new Natal body controller promotional videos:

Google Wave

This changes things:

Sign up for updates to Google Wave.

Whales Stealing Fish From Lines – Caught On Camera

At depths of 328 feet (100 meters), the massive mammals were shown plucking the fishing line at one end to free the tasty black cod at the other end—like shaking apples from a tree, scientists say.

Watch the whales:

Full scientific details at National Geographic.

Tweeting Bar

Interesting SEO/PR stunt, the bar that tweets when a beer is poured @tweetingbar

Source: http://blog.360i.com/360i-news/introducing-tweetingbar

Fact #1 Steve Jobs has Syrian roots.
After his birth in San Francisco to an American woman and a Syrian man he was given up for Adoption.

Fact #2 Atari and HP Turned Jobs Down.
Atari and Hewlett-Packard both turned down start-up funding requests from Jobs in the day:

So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.’

Fact #3 Jobs likes Gates photo credit: Seattlepi When interviewed live with Bill Gates Steve Jobs made friendly comments on their relationship referencing their long term “marriage”.	Fact #4 Jobs was a fruitarian photo credit: Dreamstime The name Apple was chosen because Apples were Steves favourite food at the time.	Fact #5 He’s not dead Bloomberg photo credit: Tombstonebuilder Bloomberg mistakenly published his 17 page obituary (29-08-2008 ) briefly before the mistake was rectified.
Fact #6 He’s an ex Hippie Please teach me Photoshop In his informative years Jobs travelled to India. Barefoot and threadbare he spent some months on the hippie trail in India, ’60s style.	Fact #7 Jobs paid $10m for Pixar photo credit: Pixar Mr Jobs purchased the computer division of Lucasfilm (of Starwars fame) in 1986 for $10 million and incorporated it independently as Pixar. Later Disney bought Pixar for $7.5 billion.	Fact #8 His catchphrases are… photo credit: Photobucket He favorite catch phrases are: “Un-be-lievable”; “Mere mortals”; “It’s huge” & “Wouldn’t it be great”. He tells the story and sells the dream, this character trait is common amongst successful entrepreneurs.
Fact #9 He’s got huge feet photo credit: Pixel Addict Steve has big feet, size 14 big. Perhaps he went barefoot in India because he couldn’t find any oversize shoes!	Fact #10 $1: Steves annual salary photo credit: bionicteaching As the Chairman and CEO of Apple Computers, he pays himself an annual salary of $1 per year.	Fact #11 Lazy parking habits photo credit: Cultofmac Some people are obsessional about catching Steve parking in Handicap spaces. Steve, you may have changed the world with your computers but you still can’t illegally park!

If today was the last day of my life would I want to do what I’m going to do today?

Thanks to Chriswrites for pointing me in the direction of this video of Steve Jobs talking at Stanford.