If you want to learn from someone’s mistakes (or laugh at someone’s miscues, that depends on your vantage point) you will be able to do so by reading this post named “10 lessons from a failed startup”. Here you have its main points:

1. Find quick money first.
2. Content businesses suck (or: do it for love and expect to lose money).
3. Know when to value speed vs. stability.
4. Set a dollar value on your time.
5. Marketing requires constant expertise.
6. Control and calculate your user acquisition costs.
7. Form partner relationships early, even if informal.
8. Plan costs conservatively and err on the side of raising too much.
9. The key to negotiating is having options.
10. Knowing isn’t enough.

One thing that shines through time and again when reading the full article is that ideals are fine but reality calls the shots. That is, you must adapt your ideals to the real world. It will never work the other way around. And yes, I know it worked for Jerry Maguire. And as much as I love that movie, that is all it is – a piece of fiction. Get real, or pick a different trade.

1. When did your site officially launch?

Beta 2007

Launch 2009

2. What does it offer its visitors? Tell us briefly about your product or service.

Fluid Forms enables inspired individuals to integrate their personal touches into real and unique objects such as furniture, jewelry, lamps or accessories, by offering easy to use Online-Design-Tools. With these Design-Tools (developed with professional designers) anyone can create and commission unique products within seconds and without any special knowledge. Especially for people interested in art and design but also for gift buyers Fluid Forms is an exciting offer. Within two weeks each unique fluid form gets produced by digital fabrication methods (such as laser-cutting, 3D-printing and CNC-milling) and directly shipped to the customer.

3. How did you develop the idea for your site? Briefly tell us the story of how you thought this product or service would work, and how and when you decided to start working on it.

I had already worked with digital production methods like laser- cutting and 3D printing as well as with 3D CAD software in my former jobs. The initial idea came up during the diploma thesis for my Master of Media Design in 2004. We started to develop first design templates and prototypes in 2005. Those where very 3D-printed vases and lamps, but back then 3D-print was still too expensive for the consumer market.

4. Did you need to look for outside investment in order to finance your project? If you had an investor for your project, tell us who that person or company was.

Fluid Forms started in an start-up incubator financed by the Government of Austria. It was ideal to start with a quite futuristic start-up idea without taking high risk.

Especially, because Angel’s investment is still not very common in Austria.

5. How many people work on your team? Tell us their names and position so we can include them on your profile. (You can send us pictures of the people working on your team if you like)

3 people: Hannes Walter CEO, Stephen Williams CTO, Andreas Jaritz CCO

Beside that about 10 freelancers are completing the team with their very special skills.

6. Tell us about any motivational activities you put into practice with your team. How do you prepare your staff in order to gain the skills required?

We strongly foster intrapreneurial behavior. Every member of our team gets the confidence of acting like a mini-company inside of Fluid Forms.

7. Are they freelancers, part-time workers, or do they work full-time?

We have a full-time model as well as a part-time model, depending on the needs of Fluid Forms and our staff.

8. Where is your company located?

We are located in the city of Graz, Austria

9. Does your team work at the office with you or do they work from home?

Both in the office and at home. We are very flexible on working hours.

10. How many visitors do you have on a daily basis?

We like to ask you for some understanding that we prefer to keep this information closed at the moment.

11. Tell us briefly about some of your strategies and expectations for the near future.

Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing are already huge trends. Fluid Forms is going to play a major role when it comes to personal product customization.

12. Do you have any other parallel projects?

The whole team is focused on different aspects concerning user-co-creation and generative design. If other companies need easy-to-use design interfaces, like the one on Fluid Forms, we provide them with our know-how and technology. Some of these client projects will get launched during 2009.

13. Do you have any other upcoming projects?

Of course some new products will get launched on Fluid Forms during 2009. These days we are launching the QR Belt Buckle. It is the world’s first design-your-own jewelry created from QR Codes.

We are also coming up with another platform for individually designed products in 2009.

14. Based on your own experience, what can you tell us about internet jobs and working online that people may not know about?

Don’t let you distract from every new Web 2.0 tool which might be useful. The Internet is developing with lightspeed. You have to realize that you CAN’T keep pace with all developments. Try to figure out which tools work well for your company and your personal workflow and which don’t (even if everyone says that it’s the new killer-app)

15. What tips can you give new internet entrepreneurs who are thinking of starting their first venture?

First, don’t develop product features - develop solutions for your customer’s problems! Often people think they do so, but they don’t. They get caught by technical details and can’t see the big picture any more.

Second, stick, or at least try to stick to your plan. After a while you’ll get the feeling for what’s realistic and what’s not and what’s worth to try out and what’s not. With that knowledge, re-adjust your plan as often as necessary and keep on going.

Third, stay focused and don’t let anybody distract you from your vision. You will make a lot of mistakes. Try to see them as an opportunity and not as a completely personal failure.

16. What strategies have worked for you in terms of getting your business up and running?

Bootstrapping, bootstrapping, bootstrapping. Try to need almost no money until you already get a steady flow of money back. I know, easy said, but there are certainly ways to do so.

If you want to come up with a high-tech innovative venture, European governments do offer all kinds of grants and tax breaks.

Have confidence in your ideas, hire only the best people and have trust in their abilities.

17. Have you been influenced or inspired by anyone?

Of course people do influence me somehow whenever I’m communicating with them. If you are aware of that, friends, family and the team are getting even more important. My father for instance is for me like a rock in terms of placidness. On the opposite my mother’s blood running through my veins is responsible for my drive and my energy.

There are many designers, artists and entrepreneurs I’m fascinated of as well. One example is James Dyson, because of his obstinacy to follow his visions. Anish Kapoor’s oeuvre is subtle and monumental at the same time. This equilibrium is always very difficult to achieve. The Eames are a class of it’s own in terms of ageless, great design.

As we all know, anthropologists propound that the behavior of individuals is dictated by the environment to more than a fair degree. This might go someway into explaining why there are so many specific networks available – networks for wine lovers, networks for bikers, networks for fighting adepts… and each one of these sites boast a completely different user interface. Making the user feel comfortable is the first building block. If the user is somehow alienated, he will not immerse himself in the site. He might not even scratch beyond the surface before going away, never to come back.

Think about it, the same happens in real life – a place that instils either dread or fright acts as a true inhibitor. You do not have a nice experience at a pop concert if right behind you there stand three thugs who send bottles flying through the sky and holler like Can Cerberus from start to finish.

And we have not even talked about technical considerations. If you want to know about how you should proceed best I advice you to read this article that deals with the main building blocks of social engineering. Here you have a brief description of each building block – don’t forget to read the original article, it is definitely worth it.

1.Voting: That is derived from sites such as Reddit and Digg. It allows people to vote up answers they think are noteworthy.
2.Tags: Tags play an obvious role – they put everything into perspective and make for immediate reference.
3. Editing: That means that discussions and topics can be changed and modified as everything shapes itself.
4.Badges: These go into showing credibility.
5.Karma: Again, another indicator of credibility.
6.Pre-search: This avoids duplication and the consequent waste of time.
7.Google is UI: This implies that pages must be Google-friendly. If not, people won’t find them.
8.Performance: If people don’t get what they are looking for from the start, you can kiss them goodbye. They must get the answers they are looking for when they request them, and walk away fulfilled at the end of it.

Well now, Sarcastic Gamer just released their take on the future of Microsoft’s applications, and it’s hilarious. Check it out here (UPDATE: posted the original, for comparison, after the jump):

Here’s the original video, the one Microsoft released:

What do you think the future of hardware is? Do you know of any startup around today that could bring this kind of products in the near future for all of us to enjoy?

Check out the full article here, below is a snippet.

How has blogging impacted you professionally? What rewards have you
achieved as a result of blogging?

All team members, myself included, have noticed that since we’ve been blogging, we don’t find it that hard to stay up to date on current startup events. By doing research for our articles, we’ve stumbled across great blogs and bloggers that have taught us many things we then put to use on other tasks.

What blogging platform did you use to start with? What are you using
now and why?

We use Wordpress. It’s very flexible and it allows us to focus on the important part of blogging: the writing.

What advice would you give to a new company trying to blog?
Nowadays, everyone is blogging. Don’t do it for competition’s sake, or you’ll be disappointed. Try to learn as much from your blog as you want others to learn from reading your articles. It’s about growth for you and your company, not just getting a million visits every day.

Sadly, it makes sense. The internet isn’t all about original ideas anymore, it’s mainly about how to get the most users by stealing as many ideas as possible from other sites and repackaging them as original. Before trying to be Twitter, Facebook was trying to be FriendFeed, which in turn was trying to be more like Twitter (weird, right?).

Twitter’s success doesn’t come because it offers a better service (it’s down almost everyday, be it planned or not) or because it offers great communication opportunities (while there are thousands of new users everyday, the idea is  not that attractive to people, which is why most of your friend’s aren’t on it already). Twitter’s success can be credited to one thing: it’s simple.

The API is easy to implement, so developers use it, spawning new and creative applications daily. Tech blogs pick up these new applications, and no matter how creative and fun to use it is, they always mention Twitter’s name. This is free publicity that draw’s attention to Twitter’s simple-yet-quirky service.

So, why can’t Facebook be Twitter? Well, it’s not simple. Facebook is a complicated mess of APIs, user-streams, applications, and notifications, that really goes over peoples’ heads. Facebook is complicated. It’s not easy to develop applications for Facebook, and it’s not easy to actually get the most out of Facebook without spending time learning how to use it.

Most people stick to the usual applications (the one’s that come with Facebook to begin with) and only play with third-party apps if they’re being force-fed to them through the main activity stream.

So there you have it: Facebook is trying really hard to be Twitter and it keeps missing the whole point. Twitter is twitter because it’s simple. Trying to be like Twitter without downright changing your domain name to Twitter is only going to generate more problems, since you’ll always have the more intricate (and thus less usable) service.

Now I have to get back to updating my Facebook status through Twitter, which in turn I update through Twhirl or Twibble, depending where I am.

Not everybody has the scope of a writer, though. And that is a pity – if one had the imagination a writer has, naming a product or domain would be an easy task indeed. Coming up with a suitable name is twice as important if only because it is the first point of contact your customers will have with it, and (people being people) we often judge everything on first looks.

Yeats once wrote something which stands true almost a century afterwards: “A line will take us hours maybe;/ Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,/ Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.” The same applies to the naming of a product or startup. The one you eventually go for has to be imbued with a feel of spontaneity that must not cross the line into being something a little child thought up in five seconds. Again – that is something that only a writer can achieve within a reasonable timeframe.

Look at the list that was published recently on The Next Web. Here you have the ten points they included:

1- Collect a lot of related words

2- Get a dictionary and a needle

3- Don’t use a browser to check for domain names

4- Invent your own words

5- Get inspiration from others

6- Buy a second-hand name

7- Browse a supermarket, library or fishing supplies store

8- Translate to Spanish, Greek and Latin

9- Remove some or all vowels

10- Call your mother

Let me add one of my own. Forget about naming a product in a foreign language from scratch. Translating a name is a different matter; picking one from square one might lead you anywhere, and only when we move within the boundaries of our native language we can be aware we are treading treacherous ground.

The main piece of advice is that the platform itself dictates the strategy, and not the other way around. That is, if you want to hang a picture on the wall you must first ensure that the picture is suitable to the wall. You can hardly modify the wall – it is the picture that will have to be suitable. You proceed from there.

These are the four points as enumerated on the list. Don’t forget to read it in its entirety.

1) Always listen
2) The brand is public
3) Don’t forget a personality
4) Creativity wins

I would like to make a small comment on the final two points. As regards the brand’s personality, every company must find a way to get its essence across without alienating former customers but which actually complements every step that it has taken before.

On the other hand, creativity is the name of the game both online and offline. Something as simple as a catchy slogan makes a true difference (“A sound decision”, Sony’s chosen tagline during the 80’s), and when it comes to social media any campaign that takes Twitter of Facebook as its starting point is more than halfway there, no matter how silly it might seem. Read about the “Sacrifice a Friend” campaign that is described on Mashable’s article and you will realize how a simple idea can elicit a lot of interest.