The more, the better. That's the fashionable recipe for nurturing new ideas these days.

Ten years ago, most bootstrapped start-ups were built for the short haul, on an 18-month plan: spend your friends’ money, build a prototype and either attract investors or close doors.

Fast forward to today, and it’s a different world. There are more bootstrapped, high growth innovative businesses than ever and – more importantly – most of them are surviving well past the 18-month mark.

If you are one of the many who has moved from the short haul to the next stage of growth, consider this your wake up call. It may be time to do some spring cleaning.

A start-up that reaches the mid-haul has meaningful assets: it has built goodwill in the business, acquired customers and built a core team. The manner in which you protected these assets in the early phases of business need to be appropriately upgraded.

Here are the areas where I often find there is a critical mismatch between the advancing stage of the company and its operating structures:

Employee Compensation : Companies heading into the mid haul have a fairly good sense of their growth path for the next 3-5 years. Now may be the time to consider whether options are the appropriate way to incent employee performance, or whether profit sharing plans would better match the company path for the mid haul.

Protecting the Company Brand: Your business now has an identifiable brand and goodwill to protect. Establishing usage rules so that your trademarks are not diluted is important. I will defer you to Jessica the trademark goddess for further advice on this matter, but the important note is this: you must establish corporate standards for how your brand is used in collateral, etc., so that you do not dilute any claim you have to that brand.

Equally important is controlling the way in which your company is discussed in the broader public sphere. Consider establishing company guidelines for employee use of social media, so that expectations are clear. Laso make sure that your alpha and beta testers (if apporpriate) have agreed not to disparage any produucts or the company.

Intellectual Property : So many of you have gone all Frodo-in-the-shire and allowed your employees to moonlight that this bears discussion. It is one thing to permit key employees to supplement income in the early years of the business through outside jobs. It is quite another when you permit employees to start their own business on the side. For example, what happens when they start taking customer support questions during your office hours?

Business issues aside, you have no way of knowing what contracts your employees have signed with outside engagements, and these can potentially impact your own intellectual property. The mid-haul is the time to re-think your moonlighting policy,as well as the invention assignment terms your early employees agreed to.

Customers: The mid-haul phase is when your business moves beyond missionary, early-adopter customers who sucked the life blood from you to follow-on customers who may be agreeable to more balanced contract terms. Now is the time to adjust contract terms and to make sure that your contracts follow your current revenue model.

Companies who have adopted a SAAS model for some of their solutions tend to need to pay particular attention to their agreements, in my experience. Most SAAS-based contracts should have provisions that allocate risk between the customer and the business for: export controls, data security, disaster recovery, redundancy backup, sales tax treatment, among other matters. If you’ve cobbled together your SAAS terms from a business that does not use the same model, chances are you’ve missed importnat elements.

I’ll blog about each of these items in detail in the next few weeks. Other issues forthe mid haul? Let me know.

A lot of people use Twitter as a primary way of getting information quickly these days. Accounts such as BreakingNews are hugely popular because they offer up stories to their 1.6 million followers (and even more through retweets) instantaneously. Topicfire, a realtime news aggregator we covered in December is now trying to extend that concept to all different topics.

While there are no shortage of services attempting to leverage Twitter to distill information for different topics, Topicfire’s streams seem pretty solid thanks to the use of their HeatRank technology, which is the same thing that powers Topicfire itself. While there are a few factors that go into HeatRank, the main driving force behind it are comments on stories. If they’re coming in fast enough, the HeatRank will get pushed to 10.

If a story hits 10, it will then get tweeted out automatically to its specific Twitter account with a link to the original story as well as the story’s page on Topicfire. This method of curation ensures that followers won’t get overwhelmed by stories that perhaps aren’t that important.

You can see the full list of the 24 Topicfire accounts here. As you can see, they range from Apple news, to design news, to skiing news, to surfing news (though ski and surf don’t have a ton of news items).

Microsoft posted strong earnings for the final three months of 2009, but some parts of its business have been having a harder time, executives acknowledged during an analyst conference call this afternoon. The company’s good news was driven by strong sales of Windows 7, while business sales are lagging.

There’s a clear contrast in tthe revenue numbers Microsoft posted today. During the last three months of 2008, business revenue outpaced Windows and Windows Live revenue, $4.9 billion to $4.1 billion. A year later, Windows leaped past to $6.9 billion, while business revenue fell slightly to $4.7 billion.

“While we have yet to see a return on business spending growth, the consumer segment continues to perform better than expected,” said Bill Koefoed, Microsoft’s general manager of investor relations.

The question-and-answer session at the end of the call seemed pretty brief, but Microsoft found time for a few answers about the enterprise sales. Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein said that it’s taking longer and longer to close those sales, and there’s sometimes a gap between the expiration of old deals and the start of new agreements — but in most cases, Microsoft isn’t losing those customers.

One analyst asked whether Microsoft expects things to remain sluggish in the coming months.

“The thing that I can say is that we have the great product pipeline,” Klein said. “We don’t have visibility into exactly what business spend will be, so we’re just going to have to work through that in the next couple quarters.”

During the just-ended quarter, Microsoft also continued its cuts with another 800 layoffs. The company’s scheduled releases this year include Windows Mobile 7 (which Microsoft is expected to demo at the Mobile World Congress in February) and Office 2010.

Here’s our photos from Apple’s event today.

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs opened the conference with a funny quote about Moses’ tablets.

Steve Jobs mingled with the crowd inside the demo area after the event.

An accessory stand turns the tablet into a cool photo frame.

ESPN’s X Games Snocross is one of the 3-D games that will be available on the iPad.

Gameloft’s Nova first-person shooter game, which is available on the iPhone, was shown on stage. The game was rejiggered to look better on a big screen. It was probably the best-looking app shown off today.

Steve Jobs was very animated as he walked through the demos, using words such as “amazing,” “wonderful,” “beautiful” and “revolutionary” frequently.

This slide shows how you can create Keynote presentation slide shows with the iPad. The slider on the left, which you control with your finger, lets you scroll up and down the slides quickly. These iWork apps are only $10 each.

This is where Steve Jobs showed you can open an Adobe PDF and read a document in its original format.

This artsy canvas hung above the demo room.

Did we say the iPad is just a half-inch thick?

Back up folks. Don’t trample the demo dude.

The iBook bookshelf, which shows the electronic books you’ve bought, looks just like a bookshelf.

Typing is a breeze on the virtual keyboard, which has big letters that are hard to miss.

The New York Times page looks great on the iPad. The newspaper spent three weeks optimizing it for the iPad. You can zoom in on pictures or play embedded videos.

Here’s how the VentureBeat page looks on the iPad!

Folks milled about after the event.

Walt Mossberg and Katie Boehret of the Wall Street Journal snapped a picture of the crowd.

The media horde before the event.

South Korea has just released beautiful schematics and visualizations for a natural preserve — to be housed in a series of state-of-the-art, glassed in domes totaling 33,000 square meters. Including an indoor wetland and botanical gardens, in addition to an education center and environmental think tank.

The landmark technology behind the project, dubbed the “Ecorium,” is the architecture devised by Korean firm SAMOO. To be constructed out of low-iron and low-e double glazed metal panels, wood and plexiglass, the structure is designed to respond to external conditions by adjusting internal temperatures and humidities to support the life taking root inside.

The idea is to give South Korean citizens, especially young people, the incentive to learn more about the natural world, the delicate balance of ecosystems and the responsibility to conserve and protect the environment. The center’s creator, the National Ecological Institute of South Korea, hopes to do this by breaking ground on a big, flashy project that could undoubtedly become a national treasure.

The Ecorium is very similar to Britain’s Eden Project, another series of geodesic domes that actually exist in Cornwall, including the world’s largest greenhouse. The preserve is a vast collection of plant species from around the planet, each dome simulating a particular type of climate. It will be interesting to see if South Korea’s efforts inspire the U.S. to do something similar. America is home to Biosphere 2, an indoor ecosystem in Arizona, but it fell short of expectation and hasn’t attracted a popular audience.

The Ecological Institute has yet to specify a construction timeline for the ecological domes in South Korea. Here are some more pictures of the plans:

BEIJING : China on Monday denied any state involvement in cyber attacks on Google and defended Internet censorship as necessary, as a row with Washington over the US firm's threat to leave the country rumbled on.

Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Apple tablet roundup: Who’s going to use the thing? — Apple’s tablet has provided no shortage of rumors. Everything from design specs to pricing have flooded the internet from various media outlets and sources. To gain a better perspective on the scope of rumors, we put together a snapshot below of the most recent speculations.

Three ways the Apple tablet will save the Earth — Yes, the headline is a bit facetious. But even if Apple’s tablet doesn’t save the planet, its users will be cutting carbon in three major industries.

Want new apps for your Android or iPhone? Here are the best directories — The best way to find new apps is to use one of the 20 or so directories out there that try to make sense of the thousands of apps. Writer Jacob Lyssy tried out a number of directories over the course of the week and recommends his favorites.

Will The New York Times meter kill traffic from social media? — Following the newspaper’s announcement that it will start charging visitors a flat fee for full access to its site, we looked at data from Hitwise to see how the move might affect traffic.

As Oracle-Sun deal gains approval, Oracle exec’s affair splashed on billboards — Just as the European Union finally gave its blessing to Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystem’s, Oracle’s co-president found details of his 8.5-year extramarital affair splashed on billboards around the United States.

And here are five more stories we thought were important, thought-provoking, or fun:

Seesmic goes after mainstream consumers, tablets with Look — The typical Twitter client, which is used to read tweets, might resemble rocket science to grandma. With that in mind, Seesmic, which is behind several mobile, desktop and web-based social media clients for keeping track of tweets and Facebook updates, is going after regular consumers with a new product called Seesmic Look.

Google: Our focused approach paid off, ‘We like the Chinese people’ — While crowing about Google’s strong fourth quarter earnings, the search giant’s executives looked back on 2009 as a whole. Google seemed to elbow its way into many new markets over the course of the year, but Vice President of Product Management Jonathan Rosenberg said it also benefited by deciding to “double down” on its core products like search.

AdMob: Apple may break its tie with Nokia for world domination — Apple, with its iPhone OS, is the dominant force in North America, Western Europe, Latin America and Oceania, while Nokia, running the Symbian OS, still leads in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, according to December 2009 survey data published by mobile advertising network AdMob. But data shows that Apple may finally be making inroads on a global level.

Facebook shows off latest versions of its game and app dashboards — Facebook showed off a new version of its dashboards that are meant to give more attention to games and other apps on its social network. It gave developers access to the new design so that they can start creating apps that are well-integrated with the dashboards.

BumpTop launches for Mac, turns your desktop into your desk (+100 accounts) — BumpTop thinks it can bridge the gap between your computer desktop and your physical desk. An application that launched initially in April of 2009, BumpTop launched a Mac version this week.

I’ve added the term “Eco-Bling” to my vocabulary. According to the U.K. Guardian, Eco-Bling refers to any green technology or product that — while seemingly slick and cool — doesn’t actually do anything to help the environment. One prime example: That Prius in your neighbor’s diveway. It certainly looks good, but when it comes down to it, it doesn’t save energy or slash their carbon footprint. Here are three more Eco-Bling offenses to keep an eye out for:

Home wind turbines: A standard utility-scale turbine generates 1.5 megawatts at its peak, but operates at 20 to 40 percent capacity on average. A typical home turbine produces 2 kilowatts when the wind is traveling at 20 miles per hour. Below 5 miles per hour produces nothing. To make residential wind power practical, you would need two big turbines and a reliable storage device — unless you live somewhere freakishly windy. If you fall for urban wind turbine offers, you could find yourself spending $2,000 on hardware and installation for something that could occasionally power your TV at night.

Easy-install rooftop solar panels: Last year, the Lowe’s home improvement chain very proudly announced that it would be selling DIY solar panels for regular consumers. These models would pay for themselves (before tax) after three years of direct sunlight, assuming no maintenance — not exactly realistic. In reality, it would take more than 15 years for a rooftop solar panel to pay for itself, as is. That’s not counting counting the carbon savings. But bang for the buck, you can do better by your wallet and the planet.

Lawns for carbon capture: Green spaces may have mental health benefits, and they certainly are green, but a study from UC Irvine shows that the average lawn or urban green space — assuming regular maintenance — produces four times the emissions it takes in for photosynthesis. There’s also water demands to consider. Towns like Las Vegas and Los Angeles are siphoning water from rivers up to 200 miles away, losing a lot of it in the process and devastating watershed ecosystems. The solution? Xeriscape your yards and lobby for public spaces to do the same.

Solar panels and wind turbines may be the hallmarks of the clean energy revolution, but it turns out there are some less flashy things you can do to make an even bigger difference. Here are a few ideas that can really work:

Insulate your home: A surprising number of houses were built without insulation. Look at the Pacific Northwest — after the Grand Coulee dam was built, electricity was dirty cheap and houses and contractors didn’t want to shell out for insulation. Now we know better. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, 50 to 70 percent of home power in this country is used for heating and cooling. When you add insulation, these costs have been known to drop as much as 30 percent. In my house, this add ups to savings of more than $80 a month on our utility bill. Considering that half the U.S. power mix comes from coal-fired plants, insulation could go a long way toward cutting down on carbon emissions as well. This sounds like common sense, but it’s still hard to make insulation sexy.

Think efficiency: If you haven’t done it already, replace every incandescent light bulb in your house with a compact fluorescent. CFLs use about 20 percent less power for the same output of light. And lighting accounts for 12 percent of home energy consumption. Improper installation of heating and cooling systems can also reduce efficiency by 30 percent. Rectifying these problems, and converting to CFLs, could easily save you 25 percent on your monthly energy bills.

Change basic habits: Set your thermostat lower or turn it off; wear more clothes around the house. Draw your curtains to cool a sunlit room rather than cranking up the AC. Turn the lights off when you aren’t in a room. If weather permits, you can even hang wet clothes on a line instead of running a power-hungry dryer.

Apple’s tablet has provided no shortage of rumors. Everything from design specs to pricing have flooded the internet from various media outlets and sources. As the mysterious January 27 “special event” comes closer, many wonder if the rumors of will finally be answered. To gain a better perspective on the scope of rumors, we’ve put together a snapshot below of the most recent speculations.

I can’t think of anything more that defines a product like its name. With Apple’s tablet, several speculations have surfaced on just what this mystical device will be called. The Street’s Scott Moritz spotlights Apple’s past attempt at an “e-notepad” dubbed The Newton and subsequently refers to the new Apple table as The Newton II. Several more popular names to surface have been the “iSlate” and the “iPad” - derived from the tablet’s generally assumed appearance as a flat touchscreen device.

Many discussions have surfaced around the design of Apple’s tablet, which will have a major effect on how the tablet is used by consumers. Today, Apple Insider’s Kasper Jade highlighted some speculation from several sources that the tablet will in fact have similar features to the original iPhone apart from a larger screen, including an aluminum shell and identical buttons. A rendering provided by a Flickr user Fotoboer.nl shows what the sources say a close match to the actual tablet, except the missing home button and volume toggle.

Another popular question among the rumors is what the Apple tablet will be used for by consumers. The Wall Street Journal highlights Steve Job’s vision of the tablet reshaping businesses involved with textbooks, newspapers and television. More specifically, through various resources close to the situation, the tablet may be geared towards families and students. Families being able to use the tablet to check email and and read the news and students using the tablet to access text books while in class. The tablet could also be an alternative to watching and playing games via a traditional television, as discussions have surfaced between Apple and CBS Corp and Walt Disney Co, along with video game publisher Electronic Arts, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Connectivity continues to be a big issue for any device these days. While speculations conclude that Apple’s tablet will have Wi-Fi, a key feature would be 3G connectivity. A recent article from The Street suggests that the new tablet will in fact have 3G provided from a wireless chip by Qualcomm. Subsequently, this might mean that Apple has chosen Verizon as its partner, said Northeast Securities analyst Ashok Kumar to The Street.

The final question on many people’s minds is how popular is Apple’s tablet going to be? A recent survey by ChangeWave Research concludes that out of a fairly decent sized test group, there is interest in the new device. Of some 3,000 plus individuals, 4% of respondents said they would ”very likely” buy the tablet while 14% said “somewhat likely.” Of those interested buyers, three-quarters said they would pay $500 or more, while 37% said they’d pay more than $700.

[image:flickr/Photo Giddy, based on flickr/Fotoboer.nl]