Recommendations
Jigsaw - Basically, this is a contact trading site. You enter your business cards to get points and use your points to get other contacts. You can search for the contacts you want using various criteria: location, company, title, etc. Very good way to get senior management contacts.
RingCentral - Ring Central was named “Best for Toll Free Numbers” in Inc. Magazine. I have personally used it for a client and it was fantastic. We were putting on an event where we hired a number of new people for a short period of time. We used the extensions feature to add them to our phone system without adding any new phones. This service is one of the few online services that truly delivered what it promised.
MIT Open Courseware - Have you ever thought, “Gee, I want to go to MIT.”? No? Well, me neither. Nevertheless, MIT offers a huge amount their course materials online for free. If you are a motivated self-study student, you have hit the jackpot. Select Sloan School of Management for the b-school courses.
DoD SBIR Link Page - If you are interested in SBIR grants, this is a useful place to start. This page is part of the DoD SBIR site and links you to all of the other government agencies that provide SBIR grants.
MAVA - This is regional — if you are on the west coast, you probably shouldn’t bother. If you are in the Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, DC area, this site provides profiles for all the regional venture capital companies.
NVCA - This is not regional — if you do not live in the mid-Atlantic regions, this is a useful site. Also, useful in general for their resources, which include model legal documents that govern investments.
VC Experts - This is really meant for folks in the venture and private equity industries, but has a bunch of interesting articles and data that will give you a feel for the venture industry.
Todoist.com - I found this one day when I was falling behind in everything and needed a simple way to keep track. The key to this site - simple. The person who designed it, designed it for himself. It allows you to create a number of categories and insert tasks for those categories. The tasks can then be viewed by category or by day (or week). It also comes with a nice print feature that prints out a list with little boxes for checking — very nice touch for my compulsive habits. I’ve always tried to keep a list with a computer before — Outlook or the Task list on my Palm, but they just never functioned in the way that really helped. Best of all, Todoist is free. It has a premium service which cost a whole $3 per month. It adds some security services and an email reminder service.
