I went to the Maker Faire in San Mateo this weekend. I had no idea these things are so popular--so much so that I gave up the first time and returned in the early evening when there was more parking and a shorter ticket line. Think: Macworld Expo meets Burning Man meets MythBusters meets Woodstock. [...]
Roger von Oech is the author a classic book about innovation called A Whack on the Side of the Head. Believe it or not, this is the twenty-fifth anniversay of the book. When I was young(er), this book was the rage for the personal-computer generation in Silicon Valley. Join me on Sun's site for an [...]
Launch: Silicon Valley 2008 is now accepting executive summaries. The deadline is May 9th. This conference is a very inexpensive way to get your startup in front of a highly-qualified audience of venture capitalists and journalists. It takes place on June 10th at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, California. For more information, click here.
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 [...]