Just got back from Houston where I spoke for the Houston Technology Center. Houston has, by far, the funniest Web 2.0 babes in the world: Jenny Lawson of Good Mom/Bad Mom and The Bloggess; Laura Mayes of Digg for Chicks, aka Sk*rt; Erica O'Grady of Reinventing Erica; Tracey Lee Wallace of True Light Resources; and [...]
Just found out about a great conference at Stanford called "Creating Infectious Engagment." It's on May 1st from 3:30 to 6:00 pm. Learn more by clicking here. It features speakers such as Diego Rodriguez, Perry Klebhan (CEO of Timbuk2), and Debra Dunn (former SVP at HP). The conference is free--it can't get much better than [...]
In honor of Earth Day, Flock released the "Eco-Edition" browser. You can download it here. This version of Flock has two compelling benefits for people who want to save the planet: Flock is donating 10% of the revenue generated by searches to a green organization. At the end of the year, users will vote for [...]
If you ever have to sell tickets for an event, look into TicketLeap. This company provides a platform that democratizes the ticket selling process and makes it easy for event organizers to handle online ticketing and promote their event. Think of it as PayPal for tickets. The company handles ticketing for a wide variety of [...]
I love ideas like this: Kids playing on a see-saw generate electrical power. Daniel Sheridan, a twenty-three year old student at Coventry University, created this design after working as a volunteer in Kenya. This fits right in with the PlayPump merry-go-round for pumping spring water and the Hippo Water Roller for delivering water. Dean Kamen's [...]
Over at the Sun Microsystems small and medium business site, I published an interview with Josh Bernoff about his new book (co-authored with Charlene Li) called Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. In this interview he discusses the impact of social media on sales, support, marketing, and branding. He and Charlene are [...]
My buddies at Fixmyphotos recently updated their site with a new design and improved functionality such as four different ways to upload digital photos for retouching. This is the firm that brought you the before and after called Guy2.0. In order to test the site, they will process orders for free until April 15th. Just [...]
Check out this new service by Muchobene. It enables website and blog owners to add real-time chat answers from a community of people. Think of it as instant messaging meets Yahoo! Answers. The first implementation is at Ubergizmo. Here the use case is that people can ask questions about gadgets of people who know about [...]
For those of you who run sites and blogs that are listed in Alltop, we've created badges that you can use on your site. You can get them by clicking here. Honestly, this isn't the real reason for this posting. One of the bloggers, Jenny the bloggess, didn't think our badges pushed the edge enough [...]
I published an interview on the Sun Microsystems small business site called "Why the Best Service Is No Service." It features Bill Price, Amazon's first Global VP of Customer Service, explaining how to provide excellent customer service. He recently co-authored a new book, The Best Service Is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from [...]
I hope you can join me at Envision’08 in San Antonio, Texas. The conference runs from April 23-25. Texas A&M's Center for New Ventures and Entrepreneurship created this conference for entrepreneurs. It features these keynote speakers: Stephen Covey, Peter Schutz, Ray Rothrock, Marcus Buckingham, and yours truly plus power-packed workshops. Click here to register. It's [...]
Jesse Stay is a social media guru. He is the co-author of I'm on Facebook--Now What???: How to Get Personal, Business, and Professional Value from Facebook with Jason Alba. This book helps individuals and business owners better manage their lives through Facebook. I asked him to provide ten Facebook power tips: You can syndicate your [...]
Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton proposed the creation of the office of the co-president of the United States. Dave Winer joined Mahalo as the vice-president of marketing. Michael Arrington announced a conference called Kemo featuring startup life-science companies demonstrating medical cures in six minutes. Steve Ballmer donated $100 million to the Jane Goodall Foundation. Herman [...]
There is an art to sucking up. Done too blatantly it will backfire. Done too weakly, you won't get what you want. The perfect suck up contains the following elements: Credibility. No matter how good you suck up, if you don't meet the requirements for placement, a job, an interview, whatever, it won't matter, so [...]
http://www.youtube.com/v/b_o5j2wgLsg This is a video of the winner of Stanford's Entrepreneurship Week innovation tournament. The challenge for the tournament was to use an everyday object to create as much value as possible. The "RubberBandTogether" team's goal is to sell the ball and donate the proceeds to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. Cost? $1/band [...]
I love Kirtsy. You can think of it as "Digg for chicks" (in the words of QueenofSpain), and it features the user-selected stories in topic such as Arts & Entertainment, Design & Crafts, Family & Parenting, and Food & Home. Today, for example, it pointed to a story about Chloe Marshall, a size sixteen girl [...]
Please check out my posting on the Sun Microsystems small and medium business web site. My first (of many) posts there is an interview with Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL who is now a senior vice-president of Sun. I'll be posting articles regularly on the Sun site and will let you know when [...]
I went to Dublin to speak for the Irish Software Association on the campus of the University College Dublin. The event drew several hundred of the top software executives in Ireland. I wasn't prepared for the extensive use of green in the country. Here is an example. The technology in Irish bathrooms is impressive. Here [...]
"Alltop is deceptively simple. The site gathers up the best suggestions from the most active social web users and compiles links into a simple, clean discovery space. For many, Alltop will replace their RSS readers." Chris Shipley, the chairman of Guidewire Group and executive producer of DEMO. Today we are opening Alltop, a news aggregation [...]
Continuing on the theme of Duncan Watts and the demise of influencers and A listers, CNET Networks conducted a three-part study called "The Influencer Study from CNET Networks: Challenging Perceptions." It explored the structure of social networks, the motivations for giving advice, and methods of acquiring information. The results challenge three commonly-held perceptions: "The Few [...]