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, [...]
SVASE (Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs) is hosting an event called “Launch: Silicon Valley” on November 8 at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View, California. SVASE is looking for new companies that are ready for launch or have launched recently. If you want to nominate a company, please email a two-page executive summary to: [...]
This is a video of a Churchill Club panel (9/20/06) that I moderated called Next Generation Insights. It featured six Silicon Valley young adults whose ages ranged from fifteen to twenty four. These are some factoids that I found interesting: They send as many as 4,000 text messages per month from their phones. They watch [...]
Jon Winokur is the author of twenty books on a subjects from advice to Zen. He finds the world’s funniest, wisest, and sarcastic quotes and publishes them in books. Trust me when I tell you that this is harder than it sounds. He’s a one-man Wikipedia of wisdom and sarcasm. I first learned about him [...]
iWoz is out. It’s a must read for anyone who’s interested in engineering and Apple. I reviewed it previously here.
Jajah announced a new service called Jajah Mobile. The original version of Jajah enabled people to make a VOIP call from any phone to any phone without a download, installation, new phone number, or allowing your computer to be used in P2P network. All you had to do is initiate the call with a computer [...]
One of the important insights that the Startups 2006 panel hammered home was the importance of distribution for consumer-facing startups. (By the way, an astounding 13,000 people watched this video during the first week.) Many people use the word “distribution” as if it were a tactic when in fact it is a goal. Any bozo [...]
I learn something new every day. Little did I know, being the trailing-edge blogger that I am, that Digg is so powerful. I’ve focused on links and Technorati, but there’s a parallel universe of traffic and Digg. Here’s a good example. This is my traffic log for the first few weeks of September. The spike [...]
My saga with my hosed hard disk is almost over. The people at the Apple store at Stanford Shopping Center took great care of me and swapped it out. Between luck, partial/old backups, and the hard work of my buddy Craig Hosoda, I have almost everything back in place. The total cost of my dumbness [...]
I came across a product called LinkSViewer from a company called GroupScope. It is a visual network analysis tool that explores relationships between management teams, outside board members, investors, and companies. It is the first application of the GroupScope network analysis engine (the result of research at Cornell University and the current work of the [...]
Do you remember comments like this about the photocasting product called FilmLoop when I posted my TechCrunch party pictures? This “FilmLoop” outfit is doomed. The scrolling thingie in the browser is cute, but when I click on a picture, I want to see the PICTURE, not a link to download an app that does the [...]
Not a day goes by when I don’t ask myself, “Why do smart companies do such dumb things?” We all know companies that cook the books and throw outrageous parties at one end of the spectrum to sell lousy products at the other. A sweeping answer is that companies are run by smart people, and [...]
Nisan Gabbay brought his blog, Startup Review, to my attention. He writes analyses (“The study of such constituent parts and their interrelationships in making up a whole.”) of successful online companies. I hope he can keep his blog going because it provides interesting and useful information. After a while, he may run out of successful [...]
A strong mind masks immaturity. —Dr. Mortimer Feinberg and John J. Tarrant How did you end your summer? A nice barbeque at the beach or maybe a quiet afternoon with the family? Mountain biking? Surfing? Bloggin? Playing in a hockey tournament? Go ahead: Ask me how my summer ended. On Saturday, September 2nd, I got [...]
As a follow up to Online Reviews and Small Businesses, check out this posting about the J curve of ratings. The most salient paragraph is: Across many clients in diverse industries this “U” curve turns out to be more like a “J” curve…almost a reverse “L”. The average rating across all clients is 4.3 out [...]
One of fortunate outcomes of the “democratization of information” is that anyone can now be a critic. You don’t even have to be work for a publication anymore because of sites like Local.Yahoo and Judy's Book. Even amateurs can rate businesses: Power to the people! Ilana DeBare of the the San Francisco Chronicle wrote a [...]
This is turning into Marketing Week where is a “week” is defined as whatever time period I am obsessed with a topic. I came across this great video from the Stanford Publishing Courses for Professionals program. It features Ina Saltz. Ina Saltz is the principal of Saltz Design and professor of electronic design at The [...]