prototyping

What We Do

MFG.com has a proprietary on-demand platform that facilitates the
complex process of sourcing and selling manufacturing services. The
technology intelligently connects Buyers with Suppliers of
manufacturing services while directing the collaboration, quoting, due
diligence and analysis processes.

Buyers request quotes online that are instantly matched to Suppliers
that have the right expertise and capacity at an exact moment in time.
Buyers benefit from discovering the right Suppliers with minimal effort
and Suppliers discover customers with an immediate manufacturing need
that they otherwise would not have known about.

MFG.com supports over 300 manufacturing processes including
machining, fabrication, molding, casting, extrusions, forging, metal
stamping and contract manufacturing of electronic components. If an
item needs to be manufactured, it can be sourced through MFG.com.

Elance is an online workplace where businesses find and hire people "on demand" to get work done quickly and cost effectively.

Web development, Design, Writing, Admin support, sales and marketing, finance, legal, engineering and manufacturing.

Facebook Case Study: Offline behavior drives online usage

Why profiled on Startup Review

Facebook was
launched in February 2004 by Harvard undergrad students as an
alternative to the traditional student directory. Its popularity
quickly spread to other colleges in the US by word of mouth, and the
site now registers close to 15M monthly UVs and over 6B page views per
month. Facebook has completed two rounds of venture financing at very
high valuations, the first at a valuation of ~$100M and the second at
~$550M (valuations are unconfirmed). These valuations were driven by
the multiple acquisition offers that Facebook has reportedly turned
down (the latest was a rumored $750M offer). Facebook is already
generating significant revenue, so despite all the valuation and web
traffic metric hype, it has also established a very real business.

Interviews conducted: Noah Kagan, early product manager for
Facebook. Noah will soon release an e-book on Facebook, with good
insight on the social networking space. You will be able to download
the book at Noah’s blog, okdork.com.
I have had plenty of informal conversations with people close to
Facebook over the last two years, while not formal interviews, I would
regard these as quality sources – employees, investors, and competitors.

I would also like to thank Nick Macey, a student at the University
of Utah for helping in the research and writing of this case study, and
providing the ever valuable user perspective as a current college
student. Nick will be helping with some of the writing on Startup
Review in the future.

Key success factors

Provide pre-existing offline community with a complementary online service

By Joel Spolsky, from "Joel on Software"

Tuesday, March 02, 2004

Here are a few tips for running a beta test of a software product intended for large audiences -- what I call "shrinkwrap".
These apply for commercial or open source projects; I don't care
whether you get paid in cash, eyeballs, or peer recognition, but I'm
focused on products for lots of users, not internal IT projects.

Some snippits....

 
1. Setup: Rapid is a State of Mind

Embrace the Possibility of Failure - it Encourages Creative Risk Taking

Enforce Short Development Cycles (More Time != More Quality)

Constrain Creativity to Make You Want it Even More

Build a Prototype(Step 5):

Build Stage: