How attractive is San Diego as a place to start a company compared with the Silicon Valley? Santa Barbara? Los Angeles?

On Thursday evening the "Sweat Equity" series of seminars sponsored by San Diego's Software Industry Council (SDSIC) brought together a distinguished panel with a venture capitalist and successful entrepreneurs answering questions, drilling into their experiences, as well as exploring perceptions they've developed over several years doing business in San Diego. More than 50 interested attendees with the hope and aspiration of either starting their own company, or breaking away from the corporate world with a startup, provided an enthusiastic audience to support the discussion and Q&A.

Panel members included:

"More than 90% of startup companies around San Diego compensate the founders and senior staff with stock options, grants, or restricted stock" advises Mike Kinkelaar, Partner at Procopio, a San Diego Law Firm.

Mike joined three other panelists discussing "Sweat Equity" and senior management compensation at the San Diego Software Industry Council's Entrepreneur's Forum Thursday evening in San Diego (SDSIC).

Sweat equity refers to "the efforts of executives or other shareholders into a company. This does not include money that is put into a business, which is financial equity. It is the time and knowledge that an individual or a group of individuals put into a business to make a result." (BusinessFinance.Com)

"If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."  Lewis Carroll

The San Diego Software Industry Council (SDSIC) continues to bring valuable seminars and training to the community.  Tuesday night the topic was "Landing Page Design: Beyond the Landing Page" with Larry Marine, owner of the new media consulting company "Intuitive Design."

The SDSIC splits its focus to provide both training to members on a variety of business skills related to technology, as well as providing a professional networking venue to help create business and individual career opportunities. 

There is a fairly clear line between constructive criticism, and destructive criticism.  The result of feedback and criticism can often encourage a very positive change in a company's market behavior - or it might signal the time is good for a fundamental shift in product lines or business strategies.

Whatever the intent, positive or constructive feedback will normally promote goodwill, and strong bond between parties, and usually results in a condition that is better than prior to the feedback.

The San Diego Software Industry Council (SDSIC) hosted "Bulls Eye Night" on Tuesday evening.  The venue is in a very nice corporate board room, with the following players:

Took the perilous journey to the wilds of San Diego last night to attend  "Cloud Computing : Impact on Business and Architecture."  This seminar was sponsored by the San Diego Software Industry Council (www.sdsic.org).

Microsoft provided the speakers, and the focus of the evening was on Microsoft's new public cloud environment called "Azure."  Probably to the speakers angst ( the speakers were Ned Curic - MS Platform Strategy Advisor, and Woody Pewitt - Technology Evangelist), much of the evening Q&A was taken up with question from the audience asking to compare Azure with services provided byu other cloud players such as Amazon and Google.

Much to the attendees angst, most of the answers were "I don't know," or "it is done with magic."