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You have a great business idea. You’ve run it by your friends, and most of them love it. the ones that don’t, you’ve rationalized that they just aren’t in your target market. You’re sitting on a million bucks, right? Now what?

I think this is where entrepreneurs truly succeed or fail. Some people just keep moving forward as major risk takers, but they don’t know how to allocate time or money. Others quit because they are risk averse and see the time and money it will take and figure its better to quit now. How do you get over these hurdles?

12seconds.tv is to video, what twitter’s 140 characters is to the written note.

Today, 12seconds.tv reveals its newest feature – the 12omercial – a 12-second video feature that can be linked to Web sites or contact information such as your Twitter or Facebook accounts. This in itself isn’t too unique. One can already tweet their 12seconds video, and people already send links to each other. In addition, now all 12seconds.tv videos track viewing statistics.

If you can sketch an idea on a napkin, then Prezi is the presentation tool for you.  Adam and I just gave our first Prezi-ntation using this “zooming presentation editor”, and it went off really well.

Prezi is a different way of thinking about presentations – not at all like traditional slideshows made in Powerpoint or Keynote.  In fact, Prezi is more like an interactive Flash video, but without having to use the Adobe Flash or know about timelines, paths or layers.

Prezi starts with a blank slate and you map out a presentation as orderly or disorderly as you want.  You can use frames to anchor areas to include photos and text into, similar to a single slide in a traditional slideshow.  Create the path which you want the presentation to travel in, by hooking assets (frames, images, video, PDF files, text) with anchors.

Exciting news! From the folks at Creative Commons comes an announcement that you can now CC-license your tweets!

It’s simple, just send one of the following tweets to @tweetcc, depending on which CC license you’d like to use (click on the link for an instant tweet):

The New York Times and Washington Post probably do the best interactive graphics and stories. If more newspapers did original “interactivities,” I think their online readership could be sustained, or even grow.

Here’s a snapshot of Twitter Chat During the Super Bowl from the New York Times today. Click on the image to see the interactive map, and navigate the different categories in the left menu as you play the Game Timeline up top:

(Although I write this post with specific focus on higher education and non-profits, I think it’s a useful guide for start-ups looking to establish themselves on the Web as well.)

New and social media have been around for the last 15 years.  But not until recently have they truly become interactive and conversational.  The tools and communities that make up this medium continue to change the way we see, hear and touch the communities around us.

When I was hired as a communications director a few years ago, my job description in short was to educate the public about research, maintain a static website, and design print publications.  It quickly became apparent that the old ways weren’t working:

Starting out, I wanted to see what the most talked about topics were between Adam and myself. Here it is:

Twitter is obviously a huge conversation piece. Follow us for more talk in 140 characters or less:

• @adamainbinder
• @sherrymain

I’m really fascinated by tag clouds.  I’m always on the look out for them, and I’m glad they are being used by the media more.  According to Wikipedia, tag clouds were spun originally from Flickr.

Tag clouds are the best way to find out in real-time what’s being talked about most, and how frequently.  Popular terms appear in a cloud, and the most popular appear in large, bolded font.  What makes tag clouds interesting – particularly when taking a snapshot of one document, such as Obama’s inauguration speech – is that you get a “sense” or “mood” for the tone of the speech, website or other collective of words and tags.

Here’s a simple slideshow that I gave to a board of executives this past week (sans audio speaking points):

I’ve designed hundreds of presentations – some for others, and many that I present myself.  I’ve also sat through many that have been boring, unmemorable, difficult to follow, and even incomprehensible (often times in a classroom).

While on the topic of consuming information, how many of you use Digg? Click on the digg button to the right if you do (my guess is few do).

Digg is awesome. it’s explained here in great detail, but basically, this is what Digg does

1. Find an article you like.
2. “Digg” the article (assuming it has the digg tags set up or you have Digg add ons to your browser).  More often an article is digged, the higher it ranks on the Digg Web site.
3. Visit Digg to see what articles people find the most interesting.