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238 items found:
  1. The Ryder Cup of Word of Mouth. Sean Moffitt at Agent Wildfire, author of blog Buzz Canuck, just published a list of top 23 U.S. Word of Mouth bloggers. As described by Sean..."...these broad-minded bloggers and company heads have distinguished themselves by trying to understand how ideas spread, online and offline, through a range of different strategies and tactics. In my opinion, they are much closer to the purpose and benefits of web 2.0, co-creation, social networks and other web, cultural and social phenomenon."I tip my hat to him for adding me to the list. I'm honored to be among this group. And I need to work on fulfilling this honor by keeping up on this blog, though these days I do a lot of blogging on Social Commerce and WOM on Bazaarblog.Here's his list of the USA Team:1. Jackie Huba/Ben McConnell - Church of the Customer (Austin, Texas)2. Andy Sernovitz - Damn! I Wish I Thought of That! (Chicago, Illinois)3. Pete Blackshaw - CGM (4. Jim Nail - Cymfony5. Ed Keller - Keller Fay6. Jeremiah Owyang - Web Strategist7. Rohit Bhargarva - Influential Marketing8. Owen Mack - CoBrandIt9. Walter Karl - WOM Study10. Fred Reichheld - Net Promoter - Boston11. Max Kalehoff - Attention Max12. Oliver Blanchard - Brand Builder13. Charlene Li - Groundswell14. Sam Decker15. Joseph Jaffe16. John Moore - Brand Autopsy (Austin, Texas)17. Peter Kim, Being Peter Kim (Austin, Texas)18. Mack Collier - The Viral Garden19. Spike Jones - Brains on Fire20. Ron McDaniel - Buzzoodle21.John Jantsch - Duct Tape Marketing22. Kim Proctor -... (09/07/08 09:00 PM)

  2. SEO tips- how to get indexed really fast through social bookmarking.. The basics are the same as always, to get your site or article indexed by a search engine as fast as possible you need quality links pointing to your site/article. Google often visits quality sites th... (09/07/08 09:00 AM)

  3. To Find As Many Profitable Niche Markets For Info Products As You Will Need. Just how do you go about selecting the best niche or niches for your online business to exploit? After all information or e-book marketing is a proven and lucrative business but for those without ... (09/07/08 09:00 AM)

  4. Land Profit Secrets to Buy Cheap Properties. Once you?TMve done significant research on the kinds of things you should pay attention to when making a property purchase, there are many ways to locate prime real estate that suits your needs and bu... (09/07/08 09:00 AM)

  5. What your Ebook needs to, most importantly?. Ebooks are more popular now than ever and with so many people deciding to enter the World Wide Web, there's no end in sight for the Ebook epidemic. If you've written Ebooks then I probably don't need ... (09/06/08 09:00 AM)

  6. Why To Approach A Copywriting Agency . There are general principles of copywriting that all copywriters will be aware of. An example is the fact that they would need to market the product, service or website and maintain positive words. Th... (09/06/08 09:00 AM)

  7. The best contents for your Ebook!. Internet specialists all agree, for real Internet achievement and to make serious money online, you need to create your own product. But what if you are a newbie? You are not an Internet expert ... (09/06/08 09:00 AM)

  8. Using Keywords to Improve Search Engine. One of the most important tricks in internet marketing is that keywords are important for search engine ranking. To get high search engine ranking, you need to discover what keywords your visitors u... (09/06/08 09:00 AM)

  9. Get Key word Density Just Right seo. It has always been about being noticed. People dress well or do something bizarre in order to be noticed or make a statement. To get ahead in life or business one needs to be at the top, first in line... (09/06/08 09:00 AM)

  10. The Secret of SEO to Effective Web Design. Webmasters who believe that there is no need to optimize web design are on a state of SEO confusion. This belief will lead to the failure of the overall search engine optimization process. It is impor... (09/06/08 09:00 AM)

  11. Yoga Bags Any Person Would Envy. Whether you’re a woman, a man or live a life filled with yoga, you’re bound to find a bag for your needs at RoZCoo. The uniquely ‘New York’ style does not have to stay in New York. Rosemary really opens up the market to everyone through her website. As a successful business woman and [...]
    (09/06/08 09:00 AM)

  12. How To Use Free Public Records Search . Public records are documents that people fill up when they need to make dealings with the government. While there are really many different types of these public records, each individual who needs to ... (09/05/08 09:00 PM)

  13. This Week’s Crazy Jobs. This week’s jobs explore the myriad strange employment opportunities the UK has to offer. There’s the usual variety of strange adult gigs; add to that the need for child labor, a Latin tutor, and a chauffeur for American diplomats, and you have a well-rounded range of the weird from the isles on the other side [...] (09/05/08 09:00 PM)

  14. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Is The Effective Online Marketing Strategy. Launching a website doesn?TMt suffice its function as there a lot more to it. In order to expand your business and reach the customers and buyers all around the globe one needs to have a mass approach... (09/04/08 09:00 PM)

  15. Loans for People on Benefit: Easy Way to Chuck out the Financial Crunch. When a person is living on benefits but suddenly need extra cash for any emergency then he get Loans for people on benefits; it is very easy to get these loans through internet as an applicant can app... (09/04/08 09:00 PM)

  16. How to Attract New Customers. Generally, when a company is trying to generate sales leads, using only one tactic is not going to work. You need to mix it up ?" use traditional techniques like direct mailers along with electro... (09/04/08 09:00 PM)

  17. Honest-1 Auto Care. When someone is looking for a car repair shop, they are looking for a place which will be honest about the repair needs on the vehicle and will offer the repairs at the lowest cost possible. So, how about a business with the word ‘honest’ in their name? Honest-1 Auto Care is committed [...]
    (09/04/08 09:00 PM)

  18. Writing a Business Plan. When it comes to writing a business plan you need to remember that it should focus on four separate elements of your business: description, marketing, finances and management. These will be the ma... (09/03/08 09:00 PM)

  19. 25 Handy iPhone Apps for Businesspeople. More than 550 iPhone apps currently populate the iPhone store, and the number is constantly growing. The challenge lies not in acquiring apps, but in finding the ones relevant to your needs. Here’s a quick-n-dirty list of some key iPhone apps for small business owners, corporate employees, and everyone in between (In no particular [...] (09/03/08 09:00 PM)

  20. ActionCOACH. With the slogan, “Coaching. Not just for sports.”, ActionCOACH has grown to become the #1 business coaching firm in the world. They currently have over 1000 offices within 26 different countries where they are able to coach as many businesses as needed to help them reach the success they are looking for. Of course, if [...]
    (09/03/08 09:00 PM)

  21. Buy an eBook and you won't ever need any more Bookshelves Covered. Peter James is one author who recognized the possibilities of electronic books long ago. His techno-thriller Host' was the first novel to be released on floppy disk back in 1995 and he has long been a... (09/03/08 09:01 AM)

  22. Email Marketing Services: For the Sake of Aggressive Advertising. You can not imagine a business without advertising and some businesses need active advertising. It means that aggressive advertising is required. It is necessary in the cases of newly launched product... (09/03/08 09:01 AM)

  23. 5 Top Job Hunting Strategies. The call to look for a good job comes at different stages. The need for job hunting could arise for a fresher or for a temporarily unemployed. However, if you have good job-hunting tips at your end, t... (09/03/08 09:01 AM)

  24. Profits Of Adsense Mixed In With Affiliate Marketing : Adsense. Are you a webmaster who needs funds to keep your website running? Or is your website the only way for you to earn income? Whichever you are, for as long as you are a webmaster or a web publish... (09/03/08 09:01 AM)

  25. Why You Need to Energize Your Team.

    (09/02/08 09:01 PM)

  26. What Happened To The 4GL?.

    On today, this day of endless blogging / talking (and hopefully downloading) of Google Chrome, I thought I'd go retro and write about my renewed hunt for the 4GL.  But first, a little context on how this came about.

    This summer I spent some time playing around with Google AppEngine to try and understand it better.  It didn't take long before I realized I needed to really understand how to program in Python to do anything.  So I spent some time reading about Python and ultimately realized that if I wanted to make any progress, I needed to spend a chunk of time actually learning Python.  Fortunately, I found a nice MIT course titled 6.00.  I took the equivalent (6.001) in 1984 when it was taught using Scheme; now it uses Python.  Oh goody - I can re-live my 18-year old student self if I want.

    As I started digging around in Python, I instinctively compared it to the languages we used at my first company, Feld Technologies.  We wrote business applications in the late 1980's and early 1990's and our language of choice was Clarion.  We also wrote one large system using DataFlex and one with Oracle7, did plenty of work with dBase and FoxPro, ultimately adopted Microsoft Access as our 4GL of choice, struggled through some stuff on the Mac with 4th Dimension, and explored doing things with PowerBuilder right at the time that we sold the company.  Some of these applications (including some of the larger ones) are still being used.

    When I was playing with Google AppEngine, I kept waiting for the 4GL "aha moment."  That's the moment I had using Clarion, DataFlex, Access, and even FoxPro where I realized how easy it was to do certain things.  That moment never came during my exploration of Google AppEngine - the deeper I got, the more confused I got.

    My plan for Google AppEngine was to write a very simply application to help me manage my art collection.  I've searched long and hard for a web based application to do this - the closest I've come is a program called Yallery written by a local friend Jennifer Ross.  Yallery is very cool and does a lot of things that I'd want to do, but like most applications it misses on a handful of very specific things I want, while adding lots of things I don't want.  So - when AppEngine came out, I thought writing a simple art collection management system (ACMS) would be a great way to solve two problems: (1) really learn how AppEngine works and (2) get my little ACMS up and running exactly the way I wanted.

    Like all good software developers, I sketched out a quick design.  Like 99% of the software I've written in the past, the application is table driven - there is a simple data structure underlying all of the various screens that I'd want.  I'd use the app via a few different modalities which would be accessed through a simple menu.  The screens, menu, and underlying database describe 80% of the application; the final 20% is something any run of the mill report writer should be able to handle.

    The optimal time to do this was when I was in Alaska in July.  I try to take on a few new things each summer "to learn" and this seemed like a perfect one.  I carved out some two hour chunks and went after it.  However, two days in and I was completely lost. It was clear that whatever construct I had in my head about what I needed to do didn't map in any way to how I needed to do it in AppEngine.

    Now, some of it may be me.  I stopped programming around the time that people were making the shift from procedural programming to object oriented programming.  C was the language of my day; not C++.  The idea of "Object Basic" or "Object Pascal" was amusing.  So - I've always struggled a little with object / method syntax.  Oh - and at my core there are two languages that have influenced me the most - Basic and Scheme - which probably explains all of my weird programming predilections.

    But something just seemed wrong to me.  Clearly AppEngine wasn't the right tool to build my ACMS in.  But, I didn't really know what the right tool was.  I know what I want - something like Clarion that works in a web-browser world.  Something that provides all the magic Ajax UI goodies for me without me having to really do anything other than specify what I want the screens to look like.  Something that knows how to bind data fields to the screens and then to a table to a database and allow me to do all kinds of data entry, sorting, and reporting on them.  Something that completely isolates error handling for me so I don't have to think about it.  As I worked through my list of "wants" I realized I was defining what a 4GL does.

    I know that there are some companies working on this.  In an attempt to be trendy, this is now called PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service).  But it's really the reincarnation of the 4GL.  And I'm not sure I really want a PaaS - I think I just want a 4GL that works with today's web-based environment.

    (09/02/08 09:01 AM)

  27. Forex Brotherhood for new forex traders. New forex traders need active guidance in their endeavour. As a forex newbie, you need to learn the tricks of the trade before venturing into currency trading full-time. In spite of what many websites... (09/01/08 09:01 PM)

  28. A Top Secret Way You Finally Can Get Google AdWords Pay-Per-Clicks FREE. A new breakthrough secret is all you now need in order to get your Google AdWords pay-per-clicks FREE! A gentleman from New York discovered what he calls an "oversight" on the part of 99.9% o... (09/01/08 09:01 PM)

  29. 10 Little-Known Secrets To Give Your Pay Per Click Advertising An Unfair Advantage. You probably know by now that Google Adwords can be one of the most competitive arenas on the internet. Fortunately, with a little good information, you won't need a corporate budget and years of mar... (09/01/08 09:01 PM)

  30. Critical Speed Writing Tips for Article Marketers. Successful article marketers have accepted the fact that article marketing is just one of the many functions that needs to be fulfilled in their online businesses. As article marketing brings traffic,... (09/01/08 09:01 PM)

  31. Need To Search Someone? Use People Directory. There really comes a time that we will want to search some information about missing persons. For example, you may be someone who has a business and needs to track a missing business partner who has y... (08/31/08 09:00 AM)

  32. You have known to need that which article you have to choose?. Your eyes are tired. You have spent time writing a wonderful batch of articles and you feel your words shine. You can't wait to get them out on the Internet to that vast audience that will click on yo... (08/31/08 09:00 AM)

  33. Exhibition stands. When should you purchase and when should you lease?. When deciding whether to buy a modular exhibition stand or to hire one, you need to consider your whole exhibition programme as well as your budget. You may be able to utilise any exhibition stands yo... (08/28/08 09:00 PM)

  34. Using Long Lasting Promotional Ideas. Every business needs to promote itself if it wants to remain fresh in the eyes of its customers, but the way you choose to promote yourself can have a big effect on the final result.

    Every ad... (08/28/08 09:00 PM)

  35. Simple Ways to Super Charge Your Brain. Dumb Little Man: No matter how powerful our brains are, they need recuperation time, to be kept in shape, and even an occasional charge. Think of it as a tune up for your brain. Skipping brain maintenance is as silly as the person wandering the parking garage because they forgot where they parked. Here are some [...]
    (08/28/08 09:00 AM)

  36. SportMatrix. If you love sports and you love photography, then you’ve got the mindset needed to go after a potentially profitable business opportunity! All you really need now is the right equipment and motivation to go after that dream. SportMatrix can’t get you the equipment but they can give you the platform you need [...]
    (08/27/08 09:00 PM)

  37. Professional Copywriting Services Can Help You Gain and Retain Your Visitors . This is the world of advertisements. Even if you have talent, it is of no use until it is promoted and marketed well. Same is the case with any business that needs good marketing. After having a websi... (08/27/08 09:00 PM)

  38. Inventor Uses Momentum To Save Gas. If you drive a car, then you already know how high those gas prices have gotten for everyone and the need to find a way to reduce those costs is extremely important. All too often magic potions and parts that we’re supposed to add to our car and reduce the fuel consumption pop up in the [...]
    (08/26/08 09:00 PM)

  39. Matching Women’s Skills With Employers’ Needs. The Plain Dealer: Shannon Davis was at home with two small children when a nagging thought just wouldn’t go away: There has to be a better way for stay-at-home moms to leverage their skills and still be around for their children. Davis never wanted to be an entrepreneur. She just wanted to do something that she enjoyed [...]
    (08/26/08 09:00 PM)

  40. MuseWorx Marketing OS Uses 'Net to Store Rich Media. MuseWorx announced teh launch of its Marketing Operating System, whose goal is to give marketers a single resource for interactive marketing campaign needs. The service is hosted "in the clouds,"...

    (08/26/08 09:01 AM)

  41. Learn Steps Needed To Make Change. Rhonda Abrams At Gannett News Service: I once saw a handwritten note over a jar for tips: “If you fear change, leave it here.” To some extent, we all fear change. Yet, to survive in business (as in all of life) we have to learn how to change — and be willing and able to change when [...]
    (08/26/08 09:00 AM)

  42. 30 Best Songs About Business and Money. Sometimes you need a theme song. These all-time favorite songs about money will motivate and inspire you - or at least bring back some fond memories!(co-written with Drea) 1. Money, Money–Liza Minnelli, Cabaret (1968) Liza Minnelli and Joel Gray perform this classic in the film Cabaret, based on the 1968 musical written by John Kander. Never has [...] (08/25/08 09:00 PM)

  43. Copywriting Heresy: Why You Don't Need Testimonials in Your Sales Letters and Ads. The following may sound like copywriting "heresy." But I swear it's true. And, if you are nervous about not having a ton of testimonials for your product or service, I think you will find it... (08/25/08 09:01 AM)

  44. Fast Talk Question - If a technology needs extensive PR to be successful does this imply that it's fundamentally just not that g. If a technology needs extensive PR to be successful, does this imply that it's fundamentally just not that good? (08/21/08 09:01 PM)

  45. The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. PRWeb: Mike Michalowicz knows business, and he knows aspiring entrepreneurs need a hard-core reality check if they’re ever going to get off their duff and start one. Founder of three multi-million dollar businesses, Michalowicz lets readers in on his proven “TPing” entrepreneurial strategies in his new book, “The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur.” “The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur” pulls no [...]
    (08/21/08 09:00 AM)

  46. The Upcoming Idaho Marathon.

    Marathon #12 is on Saturday.  I'll be running the Mesa Falls Marathon in Ashton, Idaho.  157 people ran it last year so it's a deliciously small one.  I've been training with a new coach - Gary Ditsch - for the past six weeks with a goal of ultimately getting below 4 hours.  My goal for Mesa Falls is sub-4:45 which given my training and how I feel should be achievable.

    If you recall from my last marathon (a mere two months ago in Duluth) I'm now running to raise money for the Accelerated Cure Project.  My goal is to have raised $100,000 at the end of running 50 marathons ($2,000 / marathon); to date I've raised $2,375.

    As a result of my two anchor sponsors - Return Path and Pixie Mate - I've already got $1,250 in the bag as Return Path is contributing $1,000 and Pixie Mate is contributing $250.  So - all I need from you dear readers is another $750 of contributions to make my goal for this marathon.  Any amount will do.

    Thanks in advance for Matt Blumberg, the CEO of Return Path who will be running the second half of the race with me with the explicit goal of getting me across the finish line sub-4:45.  And finally, thanks to Amy for putting up with all of this marathon nonsense.

    (08/20/08 09:01 AM)

  47. Political Joke of the Day.

    I have no idea where this joke came from, but I couldn't resist posting it because it combined Alaska, Massachusetts, Democrats, Republicans, Guns, the Pope, and a Grizzly Bear.

    The Pope took a couple of days off to visit the rugged mountains of Alaska for some sightseeing. He was cruising along the campground in the PopeMobile when there was a frantic commotion just at the edge of the woods.

    A helpless Democrat, wearing sandals, shorts, a 'Save the Whales' hat and a 'To Hell with Bush' T-shirt, was screaming while struggling frantically and thrashing around trying to free himself from the grasp of a 10-foot grizzly.

    As the Pope watched in horror, a group of Republican loggers came racing up. One quickly fired a 44 magnum into the bear's chest. The other two reached up and pulled the bleeding, semiconscious Democrat from the bear's grasp. Then using long clubs, the three loggers finished off the bear and two of them threw it onto the bed of their truck while the other tenderly placed the injured Democrat in the back seat.

    As they prepared to leave, the Pope summoned them to come over. 'I give you my blessing for your brave actions!' he told them. 'I heard there was a bitter hatred between Republican loggers and Democratic environmental activists but now I've seen with my own eyes that this is not true.'

    As the Pope drove off, one logger asked his buddies 'Who was that guy?'

    'It was the Pope,' another replied. 'He's in direct contact with Heaven and has access to all wisdom.

    'Well,' the logger said, 'he may have access to all wisdom but he doesn't know squat about bear hunting! By the way, is the bait still alive, or do we need to go back to Massachusetts and get another one?'

    Did anyone mention that the DNC is happening in Denver next week?  Egads.

    (08/19/08 09:00 PM)

  48. If You’re Not Participating in Social Media. This content from: Duct Tape Marketing If You’re Not Participating in Social Media Gone are the days when all you needed to be on the web was a web site. Today you need to think and act in terms of a total web presence. And that means if you’re not participating in social media, you’re not really [...]
    (08/19/08 09:01 AM)

  49. The Business Pundit Energy Plan: Electrification, flex power, and a smart grid. By now, 99% of us are aware of the problem. Cheap oil, whether due to peak oil or not, is over. Starting now, we need to wean ourselves off this expensive fossil fuel and find something sustainable. That is, an energy system that: a) Is not subject to mining, and therefore will not be prone to depletion; b) Sustains [...] (08/14/08 09:00 AM)

  50. National security should preclude First Amendment rights when it comes to journalists handing over their records to the govern.

    After the Federal Bureau of Investigation disclosed last week that they ?improperly? obtained reporters? phone records, Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), the ranking officials on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called for greater legal protection of journalists. The New York Times reports the senators? bill ?would limit the government?s ability to collect a reporter?s phone records and, in most cases, require a court to weigh the need for such material."

    (08/13/08 09:00 PM)

  51. This Week’s Crazy Jobs. If you’re a cheeky male Irish clone who sleeps less than 7 hours a night, habitually sells expensive lobby cards, has a housewife-melting smile, and knows National Lampoon movies like the back of your hand, you could get rich off this week’s jobs. 1. Delhi: Need a clone for Shaadi.com I need someone to clone [...] (08/08/08 09:00 PM)

  52. The Irrelevance of Silicon Valley Envy.

    A few weeks ago I wrote about the AEA survey that ranked Boulder as the #2 CyberCity in the US.  I suggested that this was misleading since #1 was "San Jose/Silicon Valley", which is not actually a city.  If you'd decomposed "San Jose/Silicon Valley" into the various cities that actually make up Silicon Valley, they would have been #1 through at least #5 and Boulder would have been #6.

    Ever since I'm moved to Boulder in 1995, the "what do we need to do to be more like Silicon Valley" meme pops up ever regularly.  I've spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, have lots of friends and colleagues there, and have made (and continue to make) lots of investments there.  It's a special and unique place. 

    Over the years, I've asserted that Colorado has no business trying to "be like" Silicon Valley.   There are lots of things that Colorado can learn from Silicon Valley and a lot of them are happening / being created in Boulder right now.  However, it's a great example of the cliche of "applying best practices" (where Boulder is learning from and applying the best practices of Silicon Valley) rather than strict emulation.

    This came up in an interview with me on ColoradoBizTV that just went up today. I have a three minute riff on why "Boulder, Denver, and Colorado in general ebbs and flows with Silicon Valley envy and that's an error" and why "the Boulder entrepreneurial scene is as healthy as it's ever been."

    (08/07/08 09:00 PM)

  53. Launching of a Common Platform For All Writers and Publishers: www.writerslinkup.com. Lots of internet magazines, numerous websites where does all that content come from?? With all these publications coming up there?TMs a growing need for good quality content. We at writer?TMs ... (08/06/08 09:00 PM)

  54. Patents, Commons, and Anti-Commons.

    Yippee - the criticism of the software patent stupidity is starting to heat up and some really smart people are making both useful arguments about the issues and interesting proposals about the solution.  In addition, there are some general articles starting to appear that explain that while patents (and property rights) have an important role in our society and in encouraging and supporting innovation and entrepreneurship, there are some well understood problems that emerge from patenting small components of complex systems - especially when the vector of innovation is steep (like - for example - with software or the Internet.)

    James Surowiecki has a great short article in the New Yorker Magazine titled The Permission Problem.  In it, he gives a great example of what Columbia law professor Michael Heller calls the "anti-commons" in his book The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives.

    "In the second decade of the twentieth century, it was almost impossible to build an airplane in the United States. That was the result of a chaotic legal battle among the dozens of companies—including one owned by Orville Wright—that held patents on the various components that made a plane go. No one could manufacture aircraft without fear of being hauled into court. The First World War got the industry started again, because Congress realized that something needed to be done to get planes in the air. It created a “patent pool,” putting all the aircraft patents under the control of a new association and letting manufacturers license them for a fee. Had Congress not stepped in, we might still be flying around in blimps."

    The anti-commons is a great reference point for what has happened with software patents.  Simply put, if too many people own individual pieces of a valuable asset - especially if those pieces are overlapping and vaguely defined (e.g. software) - you can end up with gridlock instead of innovation.  Surowiecki explains:

    "When something you own is necessary to the success of a venture, even if its contribution is small, you’ll tend to ask for an amount close to the full value of the venture. And since everyone in your position also thinks he deserves a huge sum, the venture quickly becomes unviable."

    So - we have (a) Google Sued For Patent Infringement For Keeping Track Of How Many Ads People Click On.  At the same time, we have (b) U.S. Patent Office Rejects All Ninety-Five NeoMedia Patent Claims.  For those of you uncertain about my perspective, (a) is bad.  (b) is good.  Hopefully (b) motivates the folks at Google to fight like hell to invalidate silly patents, rather than take a "let's retrench and patent everything in sight" position.

    Finally, I read an article by Timothy Lee on Ars Technica last week titled Patent Office finds voice, calls for software patent sanity.  We need smart people to step up, shout from the rooftop about how fubared the software patent system is, and provide real alternatives.  I'm optimistic that this is finally starting to happen.

    (08/05/08 09:01 PM)

  55. Help prevent what you treat....

    In reading a recent post on Bill's blog in his Monday Morning Motivation series, he offers the advice to chiropractors, or any doctor for that matter, that their highest calling is to help prevent what they treat.

    ...but what are you doing to help make yourself obsolete?

    ...The highest calling of any doctor (of any ilk) is to help prevent what it is they treat.

    Thumbnail image for obsolete.jpg

    That got me to thinking about my philosophy as a consultant and speaker. It's hard for those of us who work on the retainer system to hold the philosophy of "helping to make ourselves obsolete", but that's exactly what we need to do. There is such an abundance of opportunity out there and by working closely with our clients (whether our consultative calling is inside or outside the enterprise) to move them to a higher platform of strategic or digital marketing execution expertise, we're truly offering the service that they need (and not the service, that we need...)

    ACTION REQUIRED:

    Think about this in your interactions all week. What have we done to truly understand the client and share our wisdom on making them better marketers (or, whatever they are) so that you too can one day be obsolete to them and move on to helping clients help themselves? That is the highest calling of any consultant.


    (08/04/08 09:01 AM)

  56. The U.S. Government should tax carbon emissions..

    In a speech to the House of Representatives Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, George David, chairman of United Technologies Corp. said, "we need to say to our world that we are going to have a cost of carbon, whether it's cap-and-trade or a carbon tax.? He added that the cost of energy will be high for a long time.

    (08/03/08 09:01 AM)

  57. This Week’s Crazy Jobs. This week’s weird and wonderful gigs appear to be veering towards the medieval, with meat packers, hay stackers, dog tenders, and sea captains making the cut. The egg donor, automotive tester, and hacker positions, however, bely the fact that it’s 2008, not 1488… 1. Alaska: Meat Packers I need meat packers/camp helpers for the fall moose season [...] (08/01/08 09:01 AM)

  58. Software and Failure.

    As Amy and run around like silly people packing up to head back to Boulder tonight, I stumbled upon two fantastic posts on the web.  Consider this your daily reading if you read nothing else.

    The first is titled Five Life-Changing Mistakes and How I Moved On by Julie Wainwright.  Julie is now the co-founder of SmartNow.com but is infamous for being the CEO of Pets.com.  Her post is personal and phenomenal.  She identifies five mistakes she made leading up to and during the simultaneous failure of Pets.com and her marriage.  She then describes - point by point - how she moved on.  The mistakes follow; you'll need to click through to her article to see how she moved on. (Thanks Heidi).

    1. Allowed others to define me.
    2. I built my image of myself on two main supporting pillars.  When those collapsed, I did too.
    3. I stopped believing in myself.
    4. I stopped taking care of myself.
    5. Allowing my head to rule my heart.

    The second is titled It's the Software, Not You in the NY Times by David Pogue.  If you've been following along at home you know that I've been deeply immersed in human computer interaction (HCI) during the past year.  Pogue gives several great examples and ends with "Why do software designers want their work to appear more complex instead of less? I just don't get why they don't get it. So the next time you're frustrated by software complexity, take heart; much of the time, it's not you. It's them. It's designers who have something on their mind other than software intelligence."  Right on!

    Both are worth reading and savoring.

    (07/31/08 09:01 PM)

  59. Your Customer Lifecycle Of Needs And Wants. No one is the same when they come to you for a product, service or opportunity. Everyone needs something specifically for THEM. If you're marketing online, first start communication and build a relati... (07/29/08 09:01 AM)

  60. Why I Spend A Month A Year in Homer, Alaska.

    I wish it were as simple as "the weather."  After 27 days in a row of rain (ok - we had sun for part of two days), the sun finally came out today.

    CIMG0302

    I've been coming up to Alaska in the summer for about 15 years.  Amy grew up here and after we started going out together it seemed like a trip to her home state was in order.  I grew up in Texas, so after putting up with the "if you cut Alaska in half Texas would become the third largest state" jokes, I took a trip and immediately fell in love with the place. 

    There are many magical things about Alaska.  Everyone here has a story.  The scale of things is unbelievable.  When the sun shines, nothing is wrong with the planet.  But my favorite is that everything here needs a power wash and I get to wear jeans anywhere I go.  We bought a house in Homer six years ago and have been coming here for about a month a year ever since.

    I've written about my need for a periodic downshift as one way I manage the intensity level of my life.  I’m fundamentally an introvert, yet I spent much of my life in extrovert situations. Over time I reach a point where I need a break from human contact.  My month in Homer is my ultimate annual downshift.  While I'm up here I work about half time, which means a 40 hour a week schedule.  Since we don't know many people here I end up with a remarkable amount of reading, thinking, running, and chilling out time.  We don't have a TV - and we don't miss it.

    Over the course of the year I get tired. I get up every day at 5 am. I run 5 to 10 hours / week. I work 12 – 15 hours a day, Monday to Friday. I work on the weekends. I travel. As I get older, I've found I simply need some time each year to sleep until I wake up.

    I want more focused time with Amy. When I die, I won't have had enough time with her.  We take a week off together every quarter, but that's not enough for either of us.  I want to spend more time with her and this is a way to get a lot of time together.

    I periodically need to refresh / reboot my brain. I need time to think, experiment, and play with new ideas. Getting away and having a month in a totally different context does that for me.

    Entertainingly, I always have plenty of deal activity that happens in July.  This year I was involved in a major financing and another transaction that should close soon.  Anyone who works with me knows I am available, but very mellow.  Ah - the magic of DSL and a cell phone.

    While a month in a different context doesn't (and can't) work for everyone, hopefully this provides a glimpse into how it works for me and answers the question I've gotten over and over again this month of "what are you doing up in Homer, Alaska?"

    (07/28/08 09:01 PM)

  61. The WikiGate Scandal: Marketing on Wikipedia Puts You Into the Shredder. Need to find something? Google it. Not good enough? Wikipedia it. Expert facts lie at your fingertips. Sort of. Wikipedia is the engine of choice when it comes to quick information fixes. Google provides lots of information, fast, but Wikipedia takes the burden of site selection off users. It has exploded into an Internet standard [...] (07/28/08 09:01 PM)

  62. Communication Is Everything. If you are serious about being successful in an online business, then you must be able and willing to work hard to communicate with your buyers. If you aren't willing to put in the kind of time neede... (07/27/08 09:01 AM)

  63. Do You Need Testimonials. Testimonials can really give your web site a boost IF they are done the right way. If they aren't, you could wind up driving traffic away in droves. Remember the key thing about testimonials is t... (07/27/08 09:01 AM)

  64. Identifying Your Audience Is Power. you need to figure out what your market potential is and then know it inside out. You obviously choose your product or service because you feel it appeals to people. Do you know why it appeals to ot... (07/27/08 09:01 AM)

  65. The Tools To Start Marketing. As an online marketer you really need to know what you're doing, where you're going, what to expect, how to handle and how to find prospects. Wow, sounds like a huge task right? It's not if you ha... (07/27/08 09:01 AM)

  66. ???When the government buys up empty homes, it???s only helping lenders and speculators, not the people who need help.???.

    President Bush has continually expressed his opposition to a housing bill that proposes to include $4 billion in grants for local governments to buy and refurbish foreclosed properties.

    (07/25/08 09:01 PM)

  67. A Very Good String Of Books.

    I had a week of "a book a day" where every single one I read was great.  I'm now slogging through an "ok" book (The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism) so I thought I'd take a break and write quick reviews of the excellent ones that I have read lately.

    The Last Lecture: Wow.  Randy Pausch is just incredible.  A well known CMU professor with a great zest for life, Randy was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer in September 2006.  He broke into the mainstream with his awesome lecture titled "The Last Lecture" which was the final lecture he gave at CMU.  It's a riveting 76 minute lecture that the book was subsequently based on.  Both are worth every second you spend on them.  As of today, Randy is still alive, but according to his blog he recently "has also taken a step down and is much sicker than he had been. He's now enrolled in hospice."  (Added the morning of 7/25: Randy Pausch passed away last night.) I don't know Randy personally, but after hearing his lecture, reading as much of his as I could find on the web, and then reading The Last Lecture, I feel like a have a real sense for him.  He teaches - and inspires - in a way and at a high level that few other do in this world. 

    The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father's Nazi Boyhood: I had a wide range of emotions after reading The Last Lecture, but I wasn't prepared for The Mascot.  This is easily the best book of the year so far.  Mark Kurzem writes a complex story about discovering his father's childhood as an "adopted Nazi."  Kurzem discovers this as an adult in graduate school when his father, who has suppressed this knowledge from everyone his entire life, finally opens up to Kurzem.  As his father starts telling the parts of his story that he can remember, the two of them explore his father's past (it turns out he's a jew), and try to put the many pieces of the puzzle of his father's childhood back together.  On top of it all, the relationship between father and son is complex and evolves beautifully and unpredictably through the book.  Fabulous, shocking, brutal, mysterious, complicated, sad, depressing, and intriguing at so many levels.

    Just Do It: How One Couple Turned Off the TV and Turned On Their Sex Lives for 101 Days (No Excuses!): If you are a happily married couple living in Denver with two youngish daughters and you decided to embark on having sex every day for 100 days, what would it be like?  Yup - that's what this book is about.  It's extremely well written - has the appropriate amount of titillation and salacious stuff without being over the top while being an enjoyable romp through the complex life of a modern couple that I expect many people can relate to.  Equal parts brain candy, philosophy, biography, and - well - sex.

    The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine: I'm not an oeniphile so I didn't expect to love this book, but I did (thanks Frank for the recommendation.)  I learned an incredible amount about the history of wine while getting a great look into the mysterious world of high priced "rare" wines - and what appears to be a massive fraud that evolved over a 20 year period surrounding a wide range of "rare" wines.  The cast of characters is extensive and while this is clearly history (going back to Thomas Jefferson) it reads like a thriller.  Yum.

    Glasshouse: After that stretch of books I needed some mental floss.  I loved the Charles Stross sci-fi book that I read last week and on a reader's recommendation went on Amazon and bought all of his books for my Kindle.  This one was even better, and I've got another half dozen to go before I run out of things he's written in the past few years.

    The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means: I figured Soros would be a challenge after Glasshouse.  Every other chapter (the philosophy part) was.  I always enjoy reading Soros's books; I never completely understand them but I enjoy his blunt and cynical view about the markets and how people interact with them.

    Now - this incredible stretch of great books couldn't continue.  It doesn't.  I read about half of The Pirate's Dilemma tonight.  It's ok, but all the commentary between the examples are unnecessary as the examples are the meat (and stand on their own.)  Fortunately, I know how to skim.

    (07/25/08 09:01 AM)

  68. Alltop is Great Listening Device. Before you blog, before you create a social media strategy of any sort, you need to listen. By listen I mean tune into the truckloads of relevant industry content that’s being put out there, filtered and aggregated for your review. If you’re going to do that you want to start by following some of the [...]
    (07/23/08 09:01 AM)

  69. The 5 Stars of a "Rockstar" Employee. When you say an employee is a “rockstar” you are saying they will have a great future. They are excelling in their job – that’s a given – but to be a rockstar is to say their career is expected to shoot up like a rockstar’s record on the charts! They will scale, and are competent and trusted enough to do well in almost any job. Obviously you want to be a rockstar and you want to hire a rockstar. So what does a rockstar look like? How do you interview for them? On the plane to San Jose this week I started thinking about this, as we’re doing a lot of hiring at Bazaarvoice. In my career I’ve worked with hundreds of people, interviewed a few hundred, and hired over 100 people. A minority of these folks (say 10%) were rockstars, a minority I’d never hire or want to work with (another 10%), and the rest are in the middle. From my perspective, these are the characteristics I saw in the top 10% whom I’d be honored to work with anytime. The 5 stars of a rockstar… 1) Initiative To me, maybe because I see what entrepreneurialism and change leadership can do for an organization, this is the most important characteristic. I’ve posted on this before with my 12 career tips, about taking initiative outside your "triangle" and taking bigger risks. Rockstars must have initiative because someday they will call the shots, and as such they need to be... (07/22/08 09:00 PM)

  70. Freelance Web Content Writing Services That Can Help Your Website Improve Rankings. If you are like most website owners, you realize the importance of having quality content on your website. You also probably know that you need to keep the content that you have fresh and up to date a... (07/21/08 09:01 PM)

  71. 10 Tips To Super-Selling Copywriting. 10 Tips To Super-Selling Copywriting: You want to make sure that every time you go about writing a Sales Letter that you maximize its potential and effect. You need to pre-think your customers?... (07/21/08 09:01 PM)

  72. How To Become An Expert, On Any Subject. Let's get right into our topic, shall we? To be successful, a good salesperson needs to build rapport with their customers and prospects. If you're selling to business people, and you want to ga... (07/18/08 09:01 PM)

  73. A Book A Day Keeps The Sun Away.

    While Amy assures me there is no correlation between "books" and "sun appearance", I have been reading a book each day and there has been no sun since we arrived in Homer 12 days ago.  I was just using the same argument that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster uses to explain global warming.

    As is typical of my time in Homer, I've covered a lot of ground.  This time I'm reading exclusively on my Kindle which I love; I haven't cracked open a physical book yet.  That said, some of the books have been great and a few have been clunkers.

    Inside Steve's Brain: In preparation for the launch of the iPhone 3G, I decided to try to get into Inside Steve's Brain.  This recently became one of the trendy technology books, presumably due to everyone's desire to be as innovative as Steve Jobs (or at least learn some of his special tricks.)  I had low expectations for the book (I generally dislike books like this); it surprised me by being pretty good.  There were plenty of instructive Steve Jobs stories and interesting Apple history that I hadn't read in other places.  The summaries / lessons at the end of the chapters were tedious and there were a few "extra" chapters that could have been edited out if the book industry could handle a business book less than 200 pages.  But - overall - it's good, especially if you are an Apple fanboy.

    The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company: In my "read all about Steve Jobs" theme, I consumed The Pixar Touch.  If you are choosing between Inside Steve's Brain and The Pixar Touch, choose this one.  It's an excellent history of Pixar.  The first half is extraordinarily interesting as it details all the early people and research that formed the computer animation industry.  This book also felt more balanced (e.g. "less sensational") in its coverage of all the twists and turns that Pixar went through along the way to success.

    Halting State: Excellent "slightly in the future" science fiction incorporating all kinds of funky technology, a complex plot around virtual worlds virtual money, plenty of good guys, bad guys, a male nerd / female cop protagonist romantic plot twist, some irrational bad guys, and a few things you had to go back and read a second time to make sure you understood what had just happened.  All of it is set in Scotland resulting in some entertaining dialog for this American boy.

    Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies: Boring, but then I had already knew of many of the examples in the book.  If you are a corporate dude looking for examples of the use of "social technologies" in the enterprise, there are lots of useful stories here.  If you like to read Forrester Research stuff, you are the target audience.  Probably in the same category as Scoble and Israel's Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers - a skimmer if you are in the tech business but important and useful if you are in a large corporation and are trying to figure out what all this social networking stuff means.

    Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life: Perfect.  I love Steve Martin.  I was in junior high school when he reached the pinnacle of his stand up fame.  I remember being a wild and crazy guy, strutting around while singing King Tut, and shouting out EXCUSE ME at the top of my lungs, much to my mother's annoyance.  This is a great autobiography - I even learned that he was born in Waco, Texas.

    American Nerd: The Story of My People: So so.  I had high expectations for this book since it's about me.  About 25% of it was great, 25% of it was boring, and 50% was filler.  I think I'm going to start a book imprint called "Books in Under 100 pages", hire a few merciless editors, and make good books great by getting rid of 25% to 75% of them.  While I didn't get any new and exciting insights into nerds (although you might, especially if you are not a nerd), I learned some interesting things about ethnicity and racism that hadn't previously crossed my mind.  I'm glad I read this book and think it provides some useful insights into our culture, but damnit it didn't need to be over 200 pages.

    Final Theory: A Novel: Loved it.  A+ mental floss.  I can't remember who recommended it to me, but thank you.  Physics, murder, sexy smart women, a professor hero, explosions, fast cards, evil mad scientists disguised as pacifists, evil people, complex scientific theories that actually almost work, gratuitous almost sex, a really scary mean bad guy, and some hillbillies.  What more could you want?

    Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time: Boring.  This could have been called "the biography of Keith Ferrazzi" with a bunch of anecdotes tossed in about how to treat people.  I think I would have liked it better if it was called "the biography of Keith Ferrazzi" and I was interested in reading the biography of Keith Ferrazzi.  Note to self - don't write an autobiography and position it as a self-help business book.

    Wall Street Stories: Awesome.  Clever, entertaining short stories about Wall Street.  Written in 1901.  All equally relevant today.  While fiction, these could have easily been true stories (and I imagine they were based on real events.)  I don't play the market and this book clearly explains the reason why.

    If you are feeling depressed about your public stock portfolio, pick up a copy of Wall Street Stories - it'll at least make you laugh.  If you need a real laugh, grab a copy of Born Standing Up.  If you want to understand why you love your new iPhone so much, try out Inside Steve's Brain.  If you get tired of reading, you can always watch the latest installment of David Cohen and I explaining TechStars on ColoradoBizTV. 

    Oh - and please send some sun to Homer, Alaska.

    (07/15/08 09:01 AM)

  74. Pixie Maté - My Newest Marathon Sponsor.

    I want to welcome Pixie Maté as a sponsor of the Feld 50 by 50 Marathon Team.  Pixie Maté joins Return Path as one of my sponsors and has committed $250 to Accelerated Cure for every marathon I complete going forward.  I've got 39 to go, so that's a total commitment of $9,750 - wow guys, awesome! 

    Pixie Maté is a Boulder based organic foods company taking yerba maté to the masses.  Yerba maté is the national drink of Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and S. Brazil where it is a dietary staple next to bread and meat.  This liquid vegetable contains more antioxidants than green tea and affords a buzz like coffee, but without the jitters, and peaks and valleys.   Pixie Maté calls it the balanced buzz with a llama-load of antioxidants.

    I've gotten to know T.J. McIntyre - the founder of Pixie Maté - over the past few years.  I'm a regular Pixie Maté drinker, especially when I need a little more than tea in the mid-afternoon.  I'm powered by Maté and maybe even more invincible than Ironman.

    To date, including the first $1,000 from Return Path for running Grandma's Marathon in Duluth, MN, I've raised $2,375 for Accelerated Cure.  Between funds raised so far, the Return Path sponsorship and Pixie Maté sponsorship, I'm well over $50,000 committed.  Thanks to every one that has supported me (and Accelerated Cure) to date.

    My next marathon is in Ashton, Idaho on August 23.  Last year 159 people finished the marathon.  Matt Blumberg - the CEO of Return Path - is running the second half of the marathon with me to help bring me in under 4:45.  Wish me good training over the next six weeks.  And if you feel inclined, please click on the donate button in the widget and help support me and - more importantly - Accelerated Cure.

    (07/08/08 09:00 PM)

  75. The New to Way to Unsubscribe: Feedback Loops. Recipients of unwanted email messages have found a new way to unsubscribe from lists: Hit the Spam button. Major Internet service providers are now (or will soon be) using feedback loops to communicate complaints back to the message sender. What does this mean to email marketers? It means they need to rethink the way they display their unsubscribe link, especially if they are sending to a questionable list or are starting to receive complaints. (07/08/08 09:00 AM)

  76. Small business growth through investing. drake14.jpg











    Since launching MarketingSavant (my social media/digital marketing consulting company) earlier this year, I've been looking at a number of ways to grow the business, outside of hiring people. By growing the business I mean simply the cash base or revenues from the organization. I was caught off guard when another local consulting business owner asked me "so, what's your exit strategy?" Wow, I just kicked this thing off, what do you mean "exit strategy". Of course, I know exactly what he means, but I'd never really given it that much thought. When you're an entrepreneur or an intrepreneuer (someone with an entrepreneurial spirit inside the corporation), you need to have your own exit strategy. For me, I've chosen to pursue an 'education in investing' strategy to help grow my cash reserves while I grow the business. Yes, I know, the market isn't exactly doing well, but that's precisely the time to get in. I look at the stocks and funds that I'm investing in now and thinking back to when I graduated college in 1999... if I had invested even a modest sum then, I'd be doing quite well now. Which brings us to the one thing that I think investing and marketing have in common (I'm sure there are others...but this one is really important... Faith in the future. As marketers, we're always marketing to the future, with faith in that marketing campaign and it's ability to deliver future value. As investors, we're buying stocks and funds with faith in the company's ability to grow into the future. Marketers and investors unite! Doom and gloom does not serve you...it's the faith in the future that keeps both of us afloat and in business. [Inspired by Kevin's post on 'cracks in the retirement nest egg']
    (07/08/08 09:00 AM)

  77. I've Been Gnipped.

    Earlier this year we made a seed investment in a new company called Gnip.  Yesterday, Gnip launched their first service - a free centralized callback server that notifies data consumers (such as Plaxo) in real-time when there is new data about their users on various data producing sites (such as Flickr and Digg).  I've written my version of the overview on the Foundry Group blog in my post titled Gnip is Ping Spelled Backwards, there are a couple of posts up already on the Gnip blog, and a number of people have already written about Gnip including TechCrunch, TechCrunchIT, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, Dave Winer, and Joe Smarr (Plaxo's Chief Platform Architect).  Rather than repeat what Gnip is here, I'm going to tell you how this investment came about.

    It started in 2004.  I got an IM out of the blue from someone named bpm140 (my IM addresses are easy to find - AIM/Y!: bfeld; Skype: bradfeld; MSN: brad@feld.com.)  bpm140 asked me if I'd be willing to take a quick look at a business plan he had.  I IM'ed back that he should email it to me - I got it 30 seconds later.

    I took a look and scheduled a call.  It was a plan for an educational game thing that I didn't really get but I was intrigued by some of the stuff in it.  I talked to bpm140 (Eric Marcoullier) and gave him some feedback.  After talking for a little while I told him it wasn't my thing, but he should feel free to holler if he thought I could be helpful.

    Over the next few months I periodically got IMs from Eric.  We'd have quick interactions - usually around a specific question - and he shared with me a new idea he was working on.  He and his partner Todd Sampson (who I only knew through Eric's references to him) had this idea for a thingy (this was before little lines of javascript that you put on a blog were called widgets).  You put this thingy on your blog and it gave you statistics of how many times someone clicked on a link.  I'm a stats junky so I loved it.  Eric said it would cost $3 / month.  I told him it was stupid to charge for it, but I'd prepay for a year for $25.  He took my money. 

    Over the next few months I gave him plenty of feedback on this new thing he was calling MyBlogLog.  The UI of the stats service was hideous, but the popup link data on my blog was awesome and the stats were killer. By this point I had invested in FeedBurner, so I introduced Eric to Dick Costolo - FeedBurner's CEO.  More feedback ensued.

    One day, I got a familiar bpm140 IM saying something like "we came up this amazing idea to turn your blog into a social network."  All I needed to do was put a little different piece of javascript on my blog.  I did and the old version of the MyBlogLog widget - with names only and a really yucky font appeared on my blog.  For those of you that remember it, it was one of those amazing widgets that you suddenly couldn't ever remember living without.  Names were great, but soon little images appeared and the idea of seeing who had recently been on my blog was incredibly satisfying.  MyBlogLog took off like a rocket.

    Up to this point, Eric and his partner Todd hadn't raised any money.  I remember the first "are you interested in investing call" happening in May 2006.  Amy and I had rented and apartment in Paris for the month and I can remember the conference call with Eric and this new guy Scott Rafer who Eric and Todd had brought in to be CEO.  They were considering putting together an angel round with the idea of going for a venture round in three or four months.  I committed $25k on the spot, although I remember Scott saying he really didn't want investments of less than $50k.

    MyBlogLog continued its torrid growth over the summer, appearing on virtually every blog I read.  Fred Wilson - one of my co-investors in FeedBurner and another fan of MyBlogLog - and I started talking about doing a VC round.  We came close to do a deal (the documents were a few days away from being signed) when Yahoo! acquired MyBlogLog shortly after getting excited about them after seeing them at the Web 2.0 conference in 2006.  I had one awkward conversation with Eric where I quickly told him that while I was disappointed that I wouldn't be investing in MyBlogLog, I was psyched for him, Todd, and Scott and wished him luck.  I also told him that I'd love to stay in touch and have another chance to work with him in the future.

    I didn't expect Eric to stay at Yahoo! very long (he lasted about six months, although Todd is still there trying hard to keep the MyBlogLog flame alive.)  True to my invitation, Eric and I stayed in touch, he and Todd were a big help at TechStars in 2007, and Eric started making occasional trips out to Boulder to see me.

    I spent most of 2007 raising our first Foundry Group fund.  By the fall we had finished raising our fund and had turned our focus towards making investments.  It was in this context that Eric and I sat down on one of his trips in the fall of 2007.  Over a couple of hours, Eric ran me through a half dozen ideas he had for a new business.  He was hedging a little - struggling with whether to go deep on one business or try to start a few.  I strongly encouraged him to focus on one.  I told him that four of the six ideas were stupid, one wasn't for me, but one was awesome.  It was the seed of what turned into Gnip.

    During that trip, I dragged my partners Ryan and Seth into a conference room to sit with Eric and sketch out Gnip more.  Eric was originally calling the idea Pingery but somewhere along the way Gnip popped out and it stuck ("meta-ping server" was a little awkward).  Gnip fit perfectly in a new theme that Ryan, Seth, and my other Foundry partners were calling Glue and we told Eric that if he wanted to do Gnip as the exclusive thing he worked on, we'd be game to go after it with him.

    I got a call from Eric a few weeks later that he'd decided to go all in with Gnip.  We'd recently made an investment in Zynga and Eric had spent some time with Mark Pincus, the founder/CEO of Zynga.  I think Mark's single-minded obsession with the business he was creating made a deep impression on Eric, especially since Mark is a multi-time successful entrepreneur who also has plenty of angel investments and can basically spend his time wherever he wants.

    Part of Eric's success in MyBlogLog was his partnership with his technical co-founder Todd.  I told Eric he needed either Todd, or a technical co-founder like Todd, as part of Gnip.  Todd wasn't available as he was committed to staying at Yahoo! so we introduced Eric to a few people, including Jud Valeski.  We'd known Jud for several years as he was a Netscape/AOL refugee that had settled in Boulder.  Jud had recently left Me.dium and was working out of our offices as he contemplated his next gig.  Jud and Eric hit it off immediately and started working together remotely (Eric in the bay area; Jud in Boulder) to both flesh out the idea behind Gnip as well as see if they could work together.

    A few weeks later Eric and Jud gave their formal pitch to us for Gnip.  It was a 10 page PowerPoint presentation that outlined the idea, opportunity, and how they would go about it.  We committed to leading a seed investment of $1m on the spot - either by ourselves or with another VC firm.  A few weeks later we closed a $1.1m round with SoftTechVC (Jeff Clavier) and First Round Capital (Josh Kopelman) and were off to the races (BTW - Josh has written a really clever post about Gnip titled The Story of Francis Bates.)

    Eric, Jud, and Gnip have surpassed all of our expectations from our seed investment at the beginning of the year.  They've totally nailed the concept we were kicking around when we first started talking about Gnip, have built a superb initial service in a remarkably short period of time with the help of Pivotal Labs, and have added a handful of awesome technical people to their team.  They've managed to do this while still being split between the bay area (Eric, Tiffany, and Pivotal) and Boulder (Jud and the rest of the team).

    It took a three year courtship, but Eric and I are now working together as partners.  As my grandmother used to say, "My Gnip Runneth Over."

    (07/03/08 09:00 AM)

  78. The Latest Pile of Books.

    It's summer time and I've once again been powering through a bunch of books.  Amy and I are heading to our place in Homer, Alaska tomorrow where I'll likely continue my pace of at least a book a day.  Look for regularly updates and quick reviews here.  In the meantime, here's the latest set from the last week.

    The Turnaround Kid: What I Learned Rescuing America's Most Troubled Companies: This is the autobiography of Steve Miller, a well known turnaround executive.  He started his career at GM and progressed to be part of Lee Iacocca's turnaround team at Chrysler (he was the CFO).  After Chrysler, he has been involved in a number of turnarounds including Federal-Mogul, Morrisson-Knudson, Bethlehem Steel, Waste Management, and Delphi.  Miller is a guy that's not afraid of a Chapter 11 filing and appears to have skin as thick as the steel that Bethlehem Steel produced.  Good business history, especially if you enjoy reading about difficult situations.

    Marathon: The Ultimate Training Guide: This is an update of Hal Higdon's classic.  I picked it up at the Grandma's Marathon Expo and wolfed it down.  I got a few new ideas from it - if you are a marathoner - especially a beginning, or aspiring, one - it's definitely worth reading.

    In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto: I read this one on a trip last week to Raleigh Durham (started on the flight out; finished on the flight back).  As I ate my Balance Bar on the plane, I realized that everything that Michael Pollan was saying rang gigantic bells in my head.  The first half of the book describes the devolution of "food" from "food" to "nutrients" and has a scathing analysis of how the food industry and our government have completely screwed the American diet.  The second half of the book tells you what you can do about it.  Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants.  That's what I'm going to do for all of July - let's see what happens when I combine that strategy with > 40 miles / week of running.

    My Life on the Run: The Wit, Wisdom, and Insights of a Road Racing Icon: A few weeks ago Dan Gannon at Newmerix told me to start running Yasso 800's to get my marathon times down.  At Grandma's as I was wandering around the Expo (apparently buying books) I ran into Bart Yasso.  I mumbled in a semi-star struck way something about Yasso 800's and bought his book.  I also bought a copy for Dan that he should have by now.  Yasso is a fucking running maniac / hero / star.  I have a new running idol.  The book is a great story for anyone that likes to run.

    Masters Running: A Guide to Running and Staying Fit After 40: Yeah - I picked this up at the Grandma's Expo also.  I'm 42 so the subtitle (something about running over the age of 40) appealed to me.  This book was a no-op - Higdon seems to have slapped this one together and didn't really do anything substantive.  I got nothing from it.  Oh well - two out of three ain't bad.

    Fear & Greed: After all the running books, I needed some mental floss.  I can't remember when / why I bought this book (or maybe someone sent it to me) but it had reached the top of the infinite pile of unread books.  I got to page 100 before I quit - it should have been called "Dumb & Stupid" with a subtitle of "Poorly Written Mental Floss".

    (06/30/08 09:00 PM)

  79. FAS 157 - Another Annoying Accounting Provision.

    I feel like bitching about FAS 157 today.  I was at the annual meeting for one of our LPs yesterday and there was a long discussion about the impact of FAS 157 on both the buyout and the venture capital business.  Once again everyone was in violent agreement that this was yet another accounting rule - promulgated by the accounting industry - to generate more fees for the accounting industry while burdening companies, especially entrepreneurial ones, with additional regulations that have no real impact on reality.

    If you aren't familiar with FAS 157, it's officially known as the "fair value measurement" rule and unofficially known by some as the "mark to market" provision.  Before you ask, "wait - isn't mark to market the thing that got Enron in trouble and started this whole wave of SOX regulatory stuff", I'll simply answer "yes" and let you ponder that.

    Like our dear friend 409A, FAS 157 has come out of the latest efforts by accountants to create more transparency in financial reporting.  Like 409A, I'm sure these are well intentioned ideas although my cynical side envisions an accountant in a sub-basement of a building NY with green eyeshades and a little green desk lamp sitting around dreaming up ways to torture entrepreneurs while accomplishing his accounting bosses goal of generating more work (and fees) for themselves.  Oops - sorry - back to the main story.

    Since the beginning of the VC business, valuation methodologies were generally consistent and straightforward.  They were usually some variation of:

    1. Value your investments at your cost.
    2. If a financing happens at an increased valuation and is led by a new investor, write your investment up to the new price per share.
    3. If a financing happens at a decreased valuation regardless of whether or not there is a new investor, write your investment down to the new price per share.
    4. If bad things are happening, you can take a discretionary write down based on your best judgement.
    5. If good things are happening, you should not take a discretionary write up.  Only write things up in case #2.
    6. If the company is public, use the publicly traded price but discount it due to illiquidity (usually 25%).

    Pretty straightforward.  Very conservative.  This almost always understates the value of a VC portfolio, which presumably is a good thing since it's illiquid and the only fund performance information that should ultimately matter to a VC (and their LPs) should be the one linked to cash flows (draw downs from their LPs and distributions to their LPs.)

    FAS 157 blows this up completely.  Under FAS 157, VC's now have to mark all of their portfolio company values to market (er - "fair value measurement") qualify for GAAP (which is a requirement for every VC firm - our investors require we have audited GAAP financial statements.)

    It gets worse.  Our LPs (who typically invest in multiple VC funds - in some case many multiples) also have to adopt FAS 157.  So they also have to mark their portfolios to market.  It used to be the case that they could simply rely on the VC valuations.  To comply with FAS 157, they theoretically have to look at all of the underlying assets in the VC portfolios and make an independent judgement on the values of those underlying assets.

    Some VCs (and LPs) are just starting to implement FAS 157.  Ironically, some accounting firms wanted 2007 as the start year; others seems to want 2008 as the start year.  Many VC firms are viewing this as an annual exercise even though they report to their LPs quarterly.  Some VC firms (like us) have already built it into our quarterly reporting cycle (our accountants told us we needed to comply in 2007).  Yeah - it's all over the map. 

    But that's not the real problem.  I'll get to the real problem(s) in my next post on our new friend, FAS 157.

    (06/27/08 09:00 PM)

  80. Optimizing webforms to generate more leads through your website. After a talk on lead management, I spoke with several marketers from a company where one said, “We don’t need to qualify our leads because our web forms do the qualifying for us... then we send them to our sales... (06/26/08 09:00 PM)

  81. Unintended Consequences of Hybrid Vehicles.

    I heard a "superb" cynical statement today.  I have no idea if it is factually correct, have no data (empirical or anecdotal) to support it, but it is such a great potential example of unintended consequences that I thought it was worth putting out there.

    The statement was "While hybrid vehicles make us feel better, they actually do more harm than good because they result in more driving." 

    The follow up thought is that for hybrid cars to really work (at today's efficiency levels), people still need to modify their behavior and drive less (e.g. relying on public transportation or carpooling.)  However, once you've bought a hybrid, you suddenly feel like you are doing your part and subsequently drive more!  This additional driving adds up across the system and increases total system fuel (and other resource) consumption.

    Ponder that the next time you get in your hybrid.

    (06/26/08 09:00 PM)

  82. The Perfect Referral Motivation. Do you want to know the best way to motivate referral sources? Well, perhaps you’ve guessed it’s not money or for that matter direct compensation of any form. There will certainly be exceptions to this, but the perfect referral motivation is to tap our deep seated human need for community. People get great pleasure from [...]
    (06/25/08 09:01 PM)

  83. It's The Little Things - Or Why Windows Mobile Contact Search Sucks.

    There is a great Bill Gates email from January 2003 titled Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame that is making the rounds on the web.  I love a good rant and even though this one is dated, Gates says in great detail what a large number of Windows users have summarized over the years as "shit - why won't my damn computer do <blah>."

    I'm a heavy computer user and have some variation of this thought on a daily basis.  One of my special talents is finding bugs and breaking things - just ask any of the companies that I've invested in who their most "useful" (where useful is a euphemism for "annoying") alpha tester is.  Think of me as helping improve software quality on planet earth.

    Now - software quality is a complicated thing to measure.  Not all bugs are overt ones.  Let me give you an example of a particular pernicious Microsoft one that no one seems to ever prioritize to fix (no - I'm not going to pick on Windows Calculator again, although I could.)

    I use a Windows Mobile-based Dash.  I expect I'll try the iPhone again on July 11th now that it actually syncs with Exchange, but until then I'm tethered to my Dash.  I love the form factor and have trained my muscle memory to deal with having to press multiple keys to do things that I should be able to do with one keystroke - mostly due to design flaws in Windows Mobile.  I've used some variant of Windows Mobile for the past eighteen months (I think starting with Windows Mobile 5; I'm currently using Windows Mobile 6.1.)  If I were Mr. Windows Mobile UI Designer, I'd change a bunch of things, but it works well for what I need it for, which is primarily email, calendar, tasks, contacts, phone calls, IM, and twitter.  And sync.  My data needs to transparently sync with my Exchange server without me having to do anything.  Oh - and my BlueAnt bluetooth headset.  And I'm sure there are a few other things.

    Here's the problem - the sort algorithm on contact lookup is terrible.  I have a large contact list (5048 as of today).  Searching for "Stan Feld" should be immediate since that's how it's listed in the address book.  Progressively typing S then T then A then N should bring up "Stan Feld" immediately.  Typing "Stan Feld" into the To: field on the email program should be immediate.

    Nope.  The delay is anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds.  At some point I decided to try to figure out the underlying algorithm.  My guess is that it's doing a full table scan of first_name + last_name for each letter typed.  There doesn't appear to be an index - either fixed or dynamic - and as a result the time for most searches is approximately linear based on the number of letters typed.

    Now - if this problem was in Windows Mobile 5 but fixed in an update, I'd let it slide.  I've done at least three (I think four) major updates of the software since I've had my Dash.  There has been virtually no improvement in this feature.

    Whenever someone asks me about my Dash / Windows Mobile, I tell them that I generally like it except for this one thing.  I then describe the thing. Occasionally I'll show the thing.  And then I feel stupid that I'm still using this phone since I spend so much time looking up contacts or completing names in email fields.

    Having written my share of sort algorithms, I expect this is less than 50 lines of code regardless of which language it is written in.  It is sophomore in college computer science type stuff, not PhD stuff.  Optimizing this to improve performance by 10x - 100x is maybe a day or two of a single programmer's time.

    This is not a Microsoft-specific problem.  I could have picked on anyone.  I've got a long list of Apple issues like this, plenty of Google issues including some remarkably silly ones, and - well - don't get me started on the Yahoo ones.  All of the companies I invest in have problems like this.  It's just an endemic part of software.  And one that users shouldn't have to put up with.

    It's also not limited to software.  When filling up my car recently, the gas pump clicked off at $75.  I'd noticed this happening periodically, but now it was happening every time.  Gas is now over $4 / gallon.  Each of my cars has a 20+ gallon gas tank.  $75 doesn't fill up the tank in any of them (and in at least one it doesn't come close.)  There was a point in time when I'm sure someone decided that a way to mitigate credit card fraud at the gas pump was to limit the amount of each transaction to $75.  Now all that does is inconvenience a large number of customers with a mysterious cut off point.

    If you develop products (especially software) for a living, never forget that people remember the little things.

    (06/25/08 09:01 PM)

  84. Face-to-Face Marketing: When Media Alone Is Not Enough. While most people think of public relations as media relations, there are times when either you can't reach your audience through print, broadcast