Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

The secret to winning fans and pleasing customers might just be simplicity of design. We talked to a trio of user-experience pros about how they create intuitive (and highly successful) products.

Tips to perfect the communication between you and your staffers from Scott Gerber, founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council, and Scott Case, CEO of the Startup America Partnership.

Sure, a corporate gig might (initially) pay more than a startup and come with cushy benefits, but there are real, career-defining reasons to heed the siren song of a startup.

Ideas, both fanciful and potentially instructive for your business, flowed over the weekend in Austin. Here are 7 interesting bits we observed.

Peel, the app that learns your television tastes and turns your iPhone in a remote control , launched with the aim of creating a next-generation TV guide . "We started with discovery and control," says Scott Ellis, Peel's VP of marketing. "Now, we're focused on blowing out our social sharing." Today, the startup, which has raised more than $24 million in VC funding, finally unveiled its social experience at SXSW.

Arriving in San Antonio, 10 busloads worth of brand new companies unload their ideas on venture capitalists.

Corporate lawyers are the trained ninjas of negotiation, but you don't need three years of expensive post-grad education to learn some of their strategies. Negotiation is as unavoidable as it is it feared. In the ideal world of many young entrepreneurs, professionals would handle it all, winning the best deals for your startup and reducing the opposition to rubble.

Dave McClure, the brash-mouthed angel investor and entrepreneur-magnet, shares his lean start-up philosophy and his excitement about female entrepreneurs. The premier session of South by Southwest's "Lean Startup" track was a frank discussion between Lean Startup guru Eric Ries and Dave McClure, founding partner and "Sith Lord" of investment firm 500 Startups . While the talk covered material fairly similar to what Ries discussed in the October issue of Inc.

Why overindulging in capital can be the worst thing for your start-up's health Which do you think is a better predictor of your company’s future? To have such a great concept that investors throw $400 million at you to bring it to life? Or to face enough skepticism that you can squeeze out just $9 million over multiple rounds of funding

SXSW Interactive is one of the biggest tech and start-up conferences of the year. It's also overwhelming.

Getting customer feedback is essential in the early stages of your company--but it's what you do with it that determines your fate. Note: A version of this post first appeared on steveblank.com . The art of entrepreneurship and the science of Customer Development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers

Imagine a world where there are no downloads.

Home to a burgeoning concentration of tech start-ups and incubators, Detroit's "Webward Avenue" is not just a street--it's also a movement. Can it transform Detroit

Don't just sit there while the clock is ticking on your business idea. Go where the nerds are.

They're low-cost, and provide the typical office amenities--conference rooms, photocopiers, etc. But there are other less tangible benefits for entrepreneurs. Garages and bedrooms may be the archetypal home of scrappy new ventures, but these days entrepreneurs have another option when it comes deciding where to locate a fledgling business: coworking spaces.