Vote for Your Favorite Alltop Badge
The polls close tomorrow night, July 9th, at 9:00 pm Pacific, so be sure to cast your vote for your favorite Alltop badges. The creators of the top five badges win iPod Touches. Click here to vote.
My Debut as a Chef
My buddies at Start Cooking kickstarted my career as a chef. Please click here to watch the video of my teriyaki sauce. I won't get very far as a chef, but I love the video style of Start Cooking. Companies can use this stop-action style to explain many product and services--it sure beats the usual [...]
The Mismatch Problem by Malcolm Gladwell
Check out this great video of Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point) discussing the shortcomings of today's hiring practices. He cites examples of professional sports that conduct "combines" where teams measure the performances of prospects in the hopes of drafting the future stars. Guess what: this method doesn't work. Jobs--of all types--are more complex, and the [...]
Smart Marketing: Cannonball Run for Chicks
Check out the Silicon Valley Moms "Summer Road Trip '08." Five mommy bloggers are driving across the United States in a Chevy Tahoe Hybrid. Other sponsors include Yahoo!, CBS News, WeightWatchers, Six Apart, and Zune. The moms describe it as "5 blogging moms, 7 days without kids, 1 car without carseats, 2,000 miles to drive." [...]
Contact Lens Personal Display
Babak Parviz, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington, is working on developing contact lenses with LEDs in them. This makes the contact lenses into personal displays--and gives a whole new meaning to "EyePod." There are, however, still issues such as powering the LEDs and the fact that the lens are [...]
The Growth Mindset
"If You're Open to Growth, You Tend to Grow" should be required reading for managers and parents. It summarizes the work of Carol Dweck from Stanford. Key passage: Those who believe they were born with all the smarts and gifts they’re ever going to have approach life with what she calls a “fixed mind-set.” Those [...]
Cool Stuff Monday
A buddy of mine found three cool inventions to share with readers of my blog. These inventions can change the world and illustrate how much can be done with innovative thinking. Pot-in-pot. This is the invention of Mohammed Bah Abba of Nigeria. He is from a family of pot makers and discovered a way to [...]
Slideshare Announces “World’s Best Presentation Contest”
| View | Upload your own Slideshare is running the "World's Best Presentation Contest" again. Entries are due by July 31st. I'm a judge again this year along with Bert Decker, Nancy Duarte, and Garr Reynolds. The prizes include a MacBook Air, Amazon Kindle, iPod Nano, iPod Touch, and copies of Presentation Zen. To learn [...]
The Art of Change
Over at the Sun Microsystems blog I published an interview about the art of change. It features Ariane de Bonvoisin, the founder and CEO of The First Thirty Days, Inc. She recently published a book called The First 30 Days: Your Guide to Any Change (and Loving Your Life More). Learn about the crucial first [...]
The Inside Word on Word-of-Mouth Marketing
In this interview Dave Balter explains word-of-mouth marketing. Balter founded BzzAgent in 2002. His company has provided word-of-mouth media services for dozens of Fortune 500 companies and has been featured in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and on National Public Radio. He is also co-founder and current board [...]
One Perfect Day with IGT
Storyline: Gaming company sends corporate plane to bring nerd to Vegas to speak to casino execs. Don't get the impression that this is my usual lifestyle--I'm only blogging about this day because this never happens to me. The first stop: Executive terminal of SFO. This is north of the airport. Never been there before. There's [...]
Alltop Badge Contest
I am in pursuit of the world's greatest sidebar badges for Alltop, so we're sponsoring a contest here. The top five entries will get a iPod Touch. Legal residents of the U.S. only (it's a long story having to do with tons of legal issues). Looking forward to seeing your entry! By the way, if [...]
Brand Personality
Are you interested in the role of personality in a company's marketing? I recently interviewed Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy PR about this subject. You can read the interview here at Sun Microsystem's small business blog. He covers topics such as the creation and use of brand personalities, good and bad examples, and the role of [...]
How to Escape Corporate America
Pamela Skillings is the founder of Skillful Communications, a career and communications consulting firm in New York. Previously, Pamela spent more than twelve years as a marketing executive for companies including MasterCard International, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup. She recently published a book called Escape from Corporate America: A Practical Guide to Creating the Career of [...]
Father’s Day Gift Suggestion: Clear Card
If you're searching for a Father's Day gift that a traveling dad (or mom) will truly appreciate the whole year, consider a Clear card. This is the card that involves pre-screening of your background so that you can get through airport secureity faster. My experience is that I get through security at every Clear airport [...]
A Blooming Great Idea
This is a cool idea. I would buy one in a second. No picture. You have to trust me and click here. More cool gadget here too.
Launch: Silicon Valley Discount
Launch: Silicon Valley is coming up in less than a week. The regular price is $199, but you can get a discount by clicking here. The event is on June 10th at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, California. Thirty companies will be launching their products and services to an audience of venture capitalists, press, [...]
The Art of Unintended Uses
Most people in the mid eighties used personal computers for three primary purposes: spreadsheets, databases, and wordprocessing. Thank God that Paul Brainerd came up with the idea of PageMaker and desktop publishing, or we'd all be listening to music on cassette tapes. The principle that I learned from Aldus is that ultimately customers decide how [...]
How to Pickup a Venture Capitalist
I wrote a list of pickup/opening lines to use on venture capitalists for the Sun Microsystems small business blog. Please check it out here. The post lists the most common lines and what a venture capitalist would think when you utter such drivel. For total venture capital news coverage, try Venturecapital.alltop.com.
I’ll Never Get on a Plane Again
Holy cow, am I the last person in the world to see this? Forget Cathay Pacific's first class seat, this is the way to make a speech in a far away land: Cisco/Musion Systems TelePresence holographic video conference. John Chambers (left) is in Bangalore. The other two guys (Martin De Beer and Chuck Stucki) are [...]