There’s been a couple of juicy blog posts in Memeorandum this week about business startups. One looks at the prospects for ditching all venture capitalists and getting your new business absolutely free ~ at least for a year. The other gives ten shrewd tips on getting started.

Let’s take the freebie first ~ I’m guessing you’ll be more interested in that.

Rick Segal, who appears to be a VC himself based in Toronto, takes us step by step through the process of picking up free tools and services to get the show on the road. Some of it involves long-term free credit, and other steps come close to ripping off other businesses’ bandwidth, but let’s go with the flow on this.

The most interesting part is how you can get lots of programming, prototyping, testing effort free from a number of universities eager to give their postgrads some experience beyond the ivory tower. “… the University of Waterloo [Canada] has an entire program dedicated to taking ideas and running them through the whole process of plans, code, prototypes, etc.” And it’s all free.

How about a free domain name, and I mean a real one, not a subdomain : “Head on over to http://www.registerfly.com/ and sign up for a .be domain. It’s Belgium, beats me, but the Registerfly guys are doing them, free, for the first year.”

Hmmm, herculepoirot.be sounds good to me.

He even gives us a good Scoble joke : “And before all you Robert Scoble haters/lovers jump on this, fuhgettaboutit, I already reserved scoblewanna.be. It’s a holiday gift for mini-microsoft. But, I digress.” Ha ha ha.

Rick then makes a final pitch for ditching his profession : “Staff, infrastructure, tools, equipment and a domain name are all a pretty good start for zero capital.”

What he doesn’t mention is after all that chasing around you might need a new pair of shoes. Free shoes, anyone?

Now the second dainty dish for the startup upstart. This comes from Evan Williams, whose company, Pyra, created Blogger.com, the first real blogging tool for the masses. After selling Blogger to Google, he now has a podcasting startup called Odeo.

His post “Ten Rules for Web Startups” is on his Blogger blog, Evhead. I’ll just give the headline of each tip to save space. Anyone interested should read the original post.

1. Be Narrow
2. Be Different
3. Be Casual
4. Be Picky
5. Be User-Centric
6. Be Self-Centered
7. Be Greedy
8. Be Tiny
9. Be Agile
10. Be Balanced
11. (Bonus) Be Wary

I would add : 12. (Bonus) Always Give More Than You Promise.

You get the drift. Good advice if you’re thinking of starting that “free” business beloved of Canadian venture capitalists. But remember one thing :

13. (Double Bonus) There’s no such thing as a free donut.