Up and Running:

Cornell University is celebrating a new online product design and development certificate program with an inauguration event contest on this blog awarding the best story about “your biggest challenge when launching a new product or service.” The winner and, for that matter, any other good entries, will appear on this blog as long as it or they are good reads (and I will edit). And the winner will also appear at the www.ecornell.com website.

Contest rules: Tell your story. Send it to me using this form on my timberry.com site. Aim for no more than 300 words (”aim for” means don’t sweat it if you have 325, OK?), give me some web addresses so I can see for myself (if possible). Do it within the next week (from the day this appeared: August 3, 2009).

Nothing confidential: Remember, please, that I’m a blogger. If you don’t want your story posted where anybody can see it, then don’t send it.

Why enter? Just for entering you get $100 off of $3,000+ tuition for this certificate program. The winner gets 10 percent off tuition. Tuition is either $3,750 or $3,375 for early enrollment. I choose the winner.

What do I get out of it? Stories to tell. Nothing more. Organizers asked me to use my blog to do this, and I said yes. There’s no money involved.

Legal stuff: This isn’t a drawing or a lottery. Entry is free. You don’t have to buy anything. The prize is a 10 percent discount off of the certificate program’s $3,750 (or $3,375 if you enroll early) tuition to the winner. And Cornell offers a $100 discount off of that tuition to everybody who enters, just for entering.

The program itself, brainchild of Cornell’s systems engineering professor Peter Jackson,

“. . . takes entrepreneurs through an eight-step methodology and structured process for taking an idea or product to the point where it can be handed off for completion.”

That’s from the Cornell press release about the new program. A “certificate program” means what it sounds like. If you take this course and complete it, you earn a certificate from Cornell saying you did. That’s not a bad thing. Education is nice, and certification makes it even nicer. You can go to this page for enrollment and more detailed information.

And while I may be partial to the schools I have degrees from, this is Cornell. That’s a great logo to have on your office wall.

If you’re around the San Francisco Bay area on these dates, Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Week has been a very useful event in the past. This year it’s Feb. 18 through 25. That’s Wednesday to Wednesday.

Direct quote today, for Thanksgiving, from  Bob Sutton: “The Silver Lining: Selfishness and Greed are Not Cool These Days”:

The lost jobs, economic suffering, and fear are terrible things and my heart goes out to all those who are hurt and will be hurt by this mess. In the Thanksgiving spirit, however, I do see something to be thankful for these days: Being greedy and selfish–doing things for me, me, me and ignoring or exploiting others in the process–is out of fashion. The current crop of Stanford students [is] the most socially conscious I have ever encountered during my 25 years here–things like stopping global warming, improving K-12 education and reducing poverty are seen as what the coolest students do. And–despite how hard it is to get a job–recruiters will tell you that, to get the best students, they need to demonstrate serious commitment to these and related issues.

Have a happy, safe Thanksgiving holiday.

Interesting piece on The NY Times‘ tech blogs today, Web 2.0 meets Darwin, pointing out, unfortunately, that what goes up (some Web 2.0 ventures) can also go down.

Watching the stock market this morning has been like attending a bungee jumpers convention. (”Does his cord look like it’s a little frayed?”) Meanwhile, it doesn’t matter whether the Dow is 9000, 8000 or 7000 for tech companies to realize they need to pull away from the cliff as fast as they can. Signs of turmoil abound.

Author Saul Hansell cites several fire sales and failures, and adds:

The stream of negative news is just starting. Radical cutbacks. Fraud discovered. For every company we hear about now, there are many more that realize they are on very thin ice and are trying to figure out if they can avoid a very cold bath.

Further on he cites Rafe Needleman’s list of 11 companies in trouble . . .

Rafe Needleman takes his shot at picking this generation’s biggest losers. It is a gallery of those nifty little Web 2.0 companies that figured they would get big fast and worry about revenue later: Twitter, Meebo, Zillow and so on. He also wonders about some first-generation survivors that may not be able to make it through a second ice age, like Skype and Ask.com. I don’t agree with his analysis. MySpace may no longer be hot with a bullet, but it has revenue of $800 million a year and tens of millions of users. We should all have that kind of trouble. In any case, the dead pool is a game to play in between watching the Dow gyrate and the presidential candidates hurl mud.

Lots of bad news here, but Hansell has a point: Revenue of $800 million and tens of millions of users aren’t really that bad. “We should all have that kind of trouble.”

Let’s not get too lost in the major macroeconomic news. Startups go on. You fill gaps. New needs arise.

I just caught Wind Power Holdings snags $37M for wind turbines on VentureBeat:

“As the rest of the economy tanks, the cleantech sector has remained buoyant, with investors continuing to dump cash into wind, solar and other renewable energies. Banking on a recent wave of enthusiasm for wind power, Barre, VT-based Northern Power Systems announced that its parent company, Wind Power Holdings, has raised $37 million in first-round funding.”

Meanwhile, if you want to see startups, browse over to Startup Meme , which announces several every day. Yesterday’s posts included StartMobile and Social Text 3.0

Not that you don’t need to do something people want to pay for in a good market, with a credible management team . . . you do . . . but that’s always been true. And starting up will definitely be harder now (after the latest financial crisis) in some specific business areas affected by the mortgage crisis, Wall Street failures and so forth.

Yesterday on my Planning Startups Stories blog I posted on ADP’s report that businesses with fewer than 50 employees added 28,000 new jobs during the month of September . . . right smack in the middle of the crisis.

And I’m not saying don’t give up. Plan, revise and review your plan. Take a step back away from it, and look at it again. Give up if the specifics look bad; don’t give up if you review your plan and it still looks OK.

I invite you to tune in to WDEL, 1150 AM in Wilmington, Delaware, or to join via internet radio at www.wdel.com, where I’ll be a guest of host Rick Jensen for his daily talk show. The topic is starting your own business, sort of–I had a nice talk with Rick yesterday. I suspect he’s going to let that topic drift a bit, to baby boomers, retirement or not, recession, starting a business during a recession. That’s just a hunch. Here’s how Rick announced it on his blog:

Call-In Line: (302) 478-9335

Thinking of ways to make a little more money as the cost of everything goes up? Do you have an idea for a part-time business? Talk with Tim Berry, president and founder of Palo Alto Software, founder of bplans.com, co-founder of Borland International, author of books and software on business planning, Stanford MBA. He’s done it, written about it and teaches how to get it done.

Talk with Tim at 2:07 p.m., tomorrow, Wednesday, June 25th!

That’s 2:07 p.m. EDT, so 1:07 Central, 12:07 Mountain, and 11:07 a.m. on the (good ol’) West Coast.