Just a reminder: Hope to see you guys at the Garage/SVASE "Art of the Start" event on Wednesday, November 8th. It’s at the Microsoft Conference Center in Mountain View, California. We’re covering the topics of entrepreneurship, venture capital, product introduction, sales, and marketing. The highlight is a fireside chat with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. The [...]
Steve O’Hear traveled to America in 2004 with two friends in order to document life in Silicon Valley. The end result is a DVD that he’s selling called In Search of the Valley. It contains interviews of people like John Warnock (Adobe), Andy Hertzfeld (Macintosh programming whiz), Woz, Craig Newmark (Craig’s List) Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly [...]
You have to like an author who has the testicles (or ovaries) to walk away from Harvard Business School Press because it wouldn’t let him use the word “asshole” in his title. (HBS Press also turned me down once, but I digress...) Robert Sutton is the author who did this; he’s a professor at Stanford [...]
Over at Escape From Cubicle Nation, Pam Slim has compiled the top ten entrepreneur’s song list, complete with samples. Speaking of music, I was listening to the Greg Kihn show on KFOX this morning, and Gregg Allman called in because his daughter’s band came in second in the station’s “Last Band Standing” contest. In response [...]
My buddies at FilmLoop are about to announce a Halloween photo story contest. To enter, click here. The prize is $500 of party supplies so that you can have a good time as you scare the shiitake out of people with your costume. FilmLoop released a new version so that you can add “bling” such [...]
Blog reader Curtis Thompson asked me a very good question a few days ago: What should an entrepreneur say when she’s asked what makes her company defensible? This question is more and more common as more and more entrepreneurs start “Web 2.0 companies,” and investors torture themselves by wondering why they didn’t fund YouTube. “Defensible [...]
The Woz XM radio show “Guest DJ On A Segway” starts airing this week on Channel 15, The Village: Tuesday - Noon ET to 4:30 PM ET Friday - Midnight ET to 4:30 AM ET Saturday - 6:00 PM ET to 10:30 PM ET Monday - 3:00 AM ET to 7:30 AM ET Woz will [...]
I found a great blog entry that explains technology marketing. Here are the first three elements of this top-ten list: Marketing is not a department. Marketing is a combination of elements that creates the environment in which it is possible to meet a customer need (starting right back at product development). Promotion and sales are [...]
I may be one of the last people on the planet to hear about this experiment, but just in case I’m not, read on. Dr. Sugata Mitra conducted an experiment in 1999 in which he placed a computer connected to the Internet in a slum wall in New Delhi. He allowed children to use this [...]
One of the consequences of a boomlet is that organizations like research labs, defense contractors, and aerospace companies are going to want a piece of the action. Their logic will go like this: “The technology we invented for satellite imaging can be used for amateur video, so we could have created YouTube and sold to [...]
Coghead provides a web-based application that allows tech-savvy businesspeople (that is, non-programmers) to create and deliver their own web-based applications. Essentially, it’s bringing the “do-it-yourself” trend to software—hopefully disrupting tradition and changing the way software is created and used. It can help fill the large, unmet need for small, specialized applications because packaged software is [...]
Now-Up-to-Date Script for Motorola Q A few months ago I mentioned that I had bought a Motorola Q and posed the question of getting my appointments from Now-Up-to-Date to the phone. The best solution was this convoluted path: Export from Now-Up-to-Date, import into Palm Desktop, export as vCal, import into iCal, and then synchronize with [...]
Polly LaBarre is the co-author (with Bill Taylor) of the newly released book called Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win. The strategies, tactics, and advice in Mavericks at Work grew out of in-depth access to a collection of forward-looking companies. These maverick companies are attracting millions of customers, creating thousands [...]
I’m in Waterloo (Ontario, no French jokes, please) to give an Art of the Start speech for Communitech. I just found out that the event is open to the public and free. The speech is on Friday, October 6th at 11:00 am in Fed Hall on the University of Waterloo campus. Click here to register. [...]
America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization. Georges Clemenceau America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries [...]
Fanpop is a network of social portals where communities of fans can discover and share content and participate in discussions around their favorite topics of interest. Rather than visiting multiple websites and forums or hunting and pecking through search results, passionate users bring the best content together in one place. Fans can submit, organize, and [...]
Apparently I offended many people in my Jon Winokur interview by publishing this Vichyous attack on the French: Question: Is there any hope for the French? Answer: The French will always be the French. That’s both the bad news and the good news. What the British entertainer Ivor Novello said over 50 years ago is [...]
Yahoo! sponsored an event called “Hack Day” this weekend. Approximately 500 developers showed up and created fifty-four prototypes in a twenty-four hour period. Blip.tv has the demos here and here. The winner was called Blogging in Motion. Yahoo! even brought in Beck to entertain the crowd on Friday night. (To be honest, I had never [...]
Just returned from a few days in Mumbai. What a mind-expanding experience! I was there to speak for an IBM conference for middleware vendors and customers. The contrast in living conditions for the very rich and the very poor is eye-opening—and I didn’t see the absolute extremes of either. I’ve never seen such vivid colors [...]
In case you hadn’t noticed, I love hockey. A buddy named Dave Aiello just told me about a website that he created called RinkAtlas. He used the Google Maps API and verified and corrected the geocoding to over 1,800 rinks in the fifty states and Puerto Rico. If you ever need to find a rink, [...]