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177 items found:
  1. Popcorn Without the Left Over Kernels. Marionstar: One new vendor didn’t have much luck at this year’s Popcorn Festival, but she thinks it’s just a matter of time before her new product takes off. Deborah Boris, Rossford, is the inventor of a product called Kernels-B-Gone PLUS, a plastic disk that acts as a strainer for popcorn kernels. She was trying to market [...]
    (09/07/08 09:00 PM)

  2. 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)

  3. Business Cards Printing Guidelines ?" Part II. Business card printing is a vital factor in promotion of any business. The success of promotional campaign of your products and services depends on the performance of people involved and mode of conta... (09/07/08 09:00 AM)

  4. An overview on the onshore pipelines worldwide. Definition of Pipelines - detailing crude oil trunk lines, flowlines and gathering lines; natural gas gathering lines, transmission lines, local distribution lines; refined products pipelines; flow & ... (09/07/08 09:00 AM)

  5. Copywriter Seizes The Moment ?" Tells The Story. Feel free to use this article as long as credit is given to the resource box. © Copyright Arthur Levine, 2008 Words: 417 Keywords: Copywriter, Product, Service, Consumer, Unique The time i... (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. The Talent of the Joint Venture!. To many marketers in the "Internet Marketing" niche, setting up a joint venture (a JV) has become identical with recruiting "super affiliates" to promote a product launch. Whil... (09/06/08 09:00 AM)

  9. The Food Industry Cleans Up Its Act.

    Jeff Seabright
    VP, Environment and Water Resources
    The Coca-Cola Co.
    Atlanta, Georgia

    Water Runs Deep

    Jeff Seabright, 53, has to figure out how to clean the 290 billion liters of water Coca-Cola and its bottlers use to make its products, ensuring future water supplies for the company -- and local communities.

    (09/05/08 09:00 PM)

  10. This Week’s Links. Core77 explores what happens when physical money (ya know, the dollar notes) disappears. Why Asia likes Republicans. Behold the School of Everything, an eBay-style marketplace for people who want to teach and learn (via BoingBoing). Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science explores pseudoscience, fabricated disorders, and pharma companies desperate to sell product. A sheriff in South Carolina [...] (09/05/08 09:00 PM)

  11. Cycles.

    Now that I'm 42 years old, I've been around the computer industry long enough to understand that it runs in cycles.  I don't know how long the cycles are going to be, when they are going to reach a peak or a trough, but I do know that things will get better, will get worse, will get better, will get worse, will get better, ...

    When I reflect on it, the long term trend over the last 42 years has been amazing.  There are lots of formal and informal studies and articles on this that all link to Schumpeter's theory of creative destruction and Clay Christensen's ideas around disruptive innovation.  As the cycles play out, great new companies get created around new innovation, some reach escape velocity, some get absorbed into other large incumbent companies, and some disappear. 

    Today's New York Times has two short articles - one in Bits and the other in DealBook - that reminded me of this.

    Our good friend Microsoft makes a key appearance in both articles.  Pondering the rise, fall, rise, fall, ... of each of these companies over a 50 year period - both at a macro company level and within specific product groups - is a fun mental exercise (at least for me.)

    When I reflect on the various companies we've funded over the past year I get really excited about the stage of the cycle we are in with the new Foundry Group portfolio.  Independent of who wins the upcoming election, I think the vector of innovation around software and Internet will be steep and many of the things we've been talking about for the past 20 years as science fiction are going to start to instantiate themselves as real products and services.  The relationship between humans and computers is once again changing rapidly and the number of different amazing things that I can envision happening in the next two decades is extensive.

    I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round.

    (09/05/08 09:00 PM)

  12. Machine Vision Applications in Plastics Injection Molding. In the manufacture of consumer products, quality control is of utmost importance. In most instances where manual processes are involved, the individual who operates the machinery also performs this ta... (09/04/08 09:00 PM)

  13. Article Marketing. Article Marketing - What is it? - Why it works? - What's in it for me? Article Marketing is about writing quality original articles to promote you, your business, your products and your ... (09/04/08 09:00 PM)

  14. Make Extra Money Doing Focus Groups. Focus groups, also known as market research studies, are conducted by various companies in many larger cities throughout the United States. These groups are initiated by a company with a product or id... (09/04/08 09:00 PM)

  15. Going From Hobby To Business Savvy. The Register-Guard: Life is sweet when you can turn a hobby into a successful business, and perhaps doubly so when your product tastes good with peanut butter. That’s how it is for several home-based Lane County businesses that make, among other things, jams and jellies from local fruit or who harvest honey from their own hives. These [...]
    (09/04/08 09:00 PM)

  16. Having The Right Online Marketing Companies For You. When a company produces products then it requires market. As we are inhabitating in the internet age so advertisements of these products are done only through online marketing companies. The most imp... (09/03/08 09:00 PM)

  17. Should You Buy A Business Mailing List?. Direct mailing remains the best way to contact the decision makers at most businesses. It gives you the opportunity to expose them to the benefits of your products and services. That's why many peop... (09/03/08 09:00 PM)

  18. How to Elegance your Home & Office. Fleur-de-lis is a French word which denotes ?~lily flower?TM is used to decorate households. The variety of products can be used for diverse purposes like the Fleur-de-lis office Décor, The fleur-de... (09/03/08 09:00 PM)

  19. After Studying Three Drugs, Researchers Claim Pharma Advertising Doesn’t Work. From the Wall Street Journal: Consumer advertising for prescription drugs had a negligible impact on sales of products studied by Harvard Medical School researchers — in a finding that may confound both advertisers and their opponents. The study may undercut the arguments of opponents of such ads, which have been allowed almost nowhere outside the U.S. Critics [...] (09/03/08 09:00 PM)

  20. The Hygienic Home. A quick look around your home might lead you to believe it’s clean, but there is a good chance you might be wrong. Homes are full of allergens and many other contaminates. The Hygienic Home is a green business which will come into a home and thoroughly clean it using only eco-friendly products. [...]
    (09/03/08 09:00 PM)

  21. Copywriting - sometimes it's better to stress features, not benefits. . In copywriting, it's a good rule of thumb to stress benefits over features. That is, what's in it for the punter rather than what your product or service consists of. I say a good rule of thumb, but f... (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. Make Best Use Of Email Marketing Services. Email marketing is the basic feature of online advertising industries. Many experts suggest that email marketing is the most powerful form of advertising a company's product. These days companies are ... (09/03/08 09:01 AM)

  24. The Food Industry Cleans Up Its Act.

    Jeff Seabright
    VP, Environment and Water Resources
    The Coca-Cola Co.
    Atlanta, Georgia

    Water Runs Deep

    Jeff Seabright, 53, has to figure out how to clean the 290 billion liters of water Coca-Cola and its bottlers use to make its products, ensuring future water supplies for the company -- and local communities.

    (09/03/08 09:01 AM)

  25. Get Paid For Input On New Products. Springwise: RedesignMe, a Dutch company announced a new program by which users of the site get paid for their input on new products. How it works: product manufacturers pay RedesignMe to establish “RDM Challenges,” through which a new product concept is presented and the site’s 1,000 or so active members are asked to react to it. Currently [...]
    (09/02/08 09:01 PM)

  26. Are We Products of Our Entrepreneurial Environments?. This content from: Duct Tape Marketing Are We Products of Our Entrepreneurial Environments? I’m not sure why this riff keeps running around in my head, but I thought I would pose it to my readers as a kind of fun, but potentially telling bit of research. Owning a business, marketing a business, horn tooting, innovating, fearlessly charging into [...]
    (09/02/08 09:01 PM)

  27. Article Marketing -the most successful way of Internet marketing . It is no secret that using articles is one of the best ways to market your business, add credibility to a website and promote products. However, for you to be able to use articles as a marketing tool,... (09/02/08 09:01 AM)

  28. Entrepreneur’s Tide Comes In With Beach Souvenirs. JournalSentinel.com: The little souvenir bottle filled with seashells and sand that you brought back to Milwaukee from Sanibel Island may have made a round trip. That’s because your keepsake, which evokes memories of golden days on the beach, could have been made by Visionary Products, a Glendale company that does a million-dollar business in beach bubble ornaments, [...]
    (09/02/08 09:01 AM)

  29. Direct-to-Consumer PR Reflects Power of Do-It-Yourself. With the rise of search engines, Wi-Fi, and a Do-It-Yourself mindset, today's consumers are more empowered than ever before. They not only believe that they're entitled to information but also have unprecedented access to information on a global scale. An increasing number of consumers turn first to the Internet when they want to make a purchase?even if the product will be bought offline. That's why any PR strategy focused solely on media gatekeepers is missing a large piece of the market. While there's still value in sending your message via traditional media, more and more prospective customers are doing their own research online, bypassing newspaper, magazines, radio, and TV complet (09/02/08 09:01 AM)

  30. 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)

  31. It’s Not Stuff, It’s Man Junk. No matter where you go or what channel you watch on TV, there are endless commercials for women’s products. Where as most people wouldn’t blink an eye, some men would have to wonder, “What about me?” Joe Rowett is the Managing Director for Man Junk, a business dedicated to men’s products. Their organic body [...]
    (08/29/08 09:00 PM)

  32. Generate traffic to your website by sharing informative articles. . One of the best venues for marketing your product is the internet. If you have a website for your products, it will be easier for customers to find the items they want to purchase. It is convenient be... (08/29/08 09:00 PM)

  33. Toastabags. Worcester News: A Malvern-born inventor is celebrating after his company received a £200,000 investment from the Dragon’s Den TV show. Guy Unwin presented Toastabags, as well as a number of other innovative cookwear products, with partner Caroline Kavanagh on the BBC 2 show. Unwin, who is managing director and chief inventor of Planit Products, based at Enigma Business [...]
    (08/29/08 09:00 PM)

  34. An In Depth e-Book Compilers. Ebook compilers are a vital part of creating the final and marketable product when you write an e-book. Thus, understanding their role, how they work, and even how to pick out the right one for you is... (08/29/08 09:00 PM)

  35. Predictive Analytics Invade Email, Subscriber 'Personas' Targeted. Email marketing solutions firm iPost has launched a production release of Autotarget, its predictive analytics tool. Autotarget analyzes data from a company's business channels, segments customers...

    (08/29/08 09:00 AM)

  36. Widely-Held Attitudes about Various Generations Studied. Generation Y is the most self-indulgent, Generation X is the most innovative, and Boomers are the most productive, while the "Silent Generation" and the "Greatest Generation" are the most admired,...

    (08/29/08 09:00 AM)

  37. Genewize Life Sciences and Attraction Marketing.. Genewize Life Sciences is a network marketing company and like all other network marketing companies, they offer the opportunity for people, like you and me, to market their products in exchange for a... (08/28/08 09:00 PM)

  38. My Relationship With Apple Is Like My Relationship With The Republican Party.

    Scott Converse has a wonderful post up titled Is Apple a Republican?  After reading it, I pondered my relationship with Apple and realized that it is just like my relationship with the Republican Party - there are some things that theoretically appeal to me, but endless deal breakers that push me away and head fakes that leave me cynical.

    If you are a long time reader of this blog, you know that every six months or so I try again.  I go to the Apple store and buy whatever shiny new Mac toy there is.  A G5 - yeah.  A MacBook Pro.  Sure.  An iPhone - definitely.  A MacBook Air.  Yeah, this will be the one.  After tens of thousands of dollars spent on Apple products, the only three I am using today are my Apple 30" Cinema Displays (I love them), my G5 in my office (which I'm running Vista on), and my iPhone 3G (which has now lasted three weeks notwithstanding the endless dropped calls and lack of Outlook Task synchronization.)

    The Republicans promise me smaller government.  Oops.  Better fiscal policy (e.g. no deficits) - double oops.  Distribution of power to state and local government.  Um, yeah.  Equality for all.  Patriot act, immigration policy, wars, anyone.  The list goes on.  I've always described myself as "conservative fiscal policy, liberal social policy" where theoretically a "moderate Republican approach" would work for me. 

    Wrong.  The big deal breaker for me is abortion.  I couldn't ever vote for a pro-life president.  Stay with me, you'll get the Apple analogy soon.  There are plenty of others - war, immigration, protectionism, religion - but I still fantasize about that enlightened "conservative fiscal policy, liberal social policy."

    Ironically, my friends the Democrats have always had the liberal social policy down and now appear to have a much better handle on the conservative fiscal policy side of it.  I was a Reagan youth, but have voted Democrat ever since.  And while many think I'm a hard core Democrat, I'm actually an Independent.

    About the time I voted for Reagan, I had an original Mac.  My first computer was an Apple II.  I even had an Apple III for a while.  My Mac had one floppy drive and 128k.  I loved it even though it was basically useless.  When I got my first IBM PC (two floppy disk drives, 64k) and started writing software on it (and making money with it) I became a PC / Microsoft user.  My Apple fantasies continued unabated - every few years I'd buy another one and end up discarding it after a few weeks to go back to my PC.  There were always "deal breakers."

    The deal breaker for me with Apple for the past few years has been Microsoft Exchange support.  Entourage 2004 was so inadequate that it never became an option for me and Entourage 2008 disappointed me so much that I punted.  I don't really want to run Entourage - I want native Exchange support in all the Mac products.  ActiveSync anyone?

    I tried with the first iPhone - I really wanted to like it - but it just didn't get there for me.  Remarkably, after resisting for many years, Apple finally licensed ActiveSync and integrated it into the iPhone 2.0 software.  Voila - I dumped my Dash and am still using my iPhone 3G several weeks later.

    But - Apple forgot one thing.  Tasks.  Apple syncs Mail and Calendar with Exchange, but not Tasks.  For anyone that is a hard core Outlook user (like me) that manages to a zero inbox, Tasks are important.  It's kind of like being pro-choice but being against birth control.  Weird.  Limiting.  And intensely frustrating.

    Third party apps are starting to appear that try to sync Tasks, but they are all weak.  KeyTasks from  Chapura seems to come the closest so far, but it's not server side sync (with Exchange) - you have to have a client side agent running.  And of course, it doesn't have categories ("Category support coming soon.")

    Theoretically wonderful, but always comes up short with a deal breaker.  We didn't even get into religion yet, but ponder that as you think about the Cult of Mac vs. the PC / Microsoft. 

    I definitely have too much politics on the brain.  I can't wait until 2009.

    (08/28/08 09:01 AM)

  39. Promotional Gifts Store- A Place to Find Apt Promotional Product. Promotional products are the imprinted products with the company's name, logo or message. These products help a company to promote its business. The advent of promotional products has directed a new w... (08/27/08 09:00 PM)

  40. Promotional Gifts Store- Promoting Business with Embossed Products.

    Promotional gifts stores offer a wide range of products embossed with company's name, logo, or message. These products help in the promotion of the brand. Many well established companies as well as... (08/27/08 09:00 PM)

  41. Kate Hudson Gets Sued for Stealing Product Information. Does She Have a Case?. From Reuters: “Fool’s Gold” star Kate Hudson has been sued by a firm that says hair care products she developed with hair stylist-to-the-stars David Babaii are based on ideas for using volcanic ash that the firm developed. In the lawsuit, which was filed on Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court, 220 Laboratories said it entered into an [...] (08/27/08 09:00 PM)

  42. This Mom Is A Know-It-All. As any new parent knows, it can be nearly impossible to figure out which products are a must and what is a waste when purchasing baby products. There is just too much to choose from. Kimberly Shore Levin of Nursery Know-It-All can tell you all about it. As the mom of 3 children under [...]
    (08/27/08 09:00 PM)

  43. Tips On Writing Good Sales Copy Fast And Easy . Ask any business owner on the internet what their biggest challenge is and their answer is more than likely going to be creating a solid sales copy for their services or products. The sales copy is ... (08/27/08 09:00 PM)

  44. GAO FiberOptics has released a series of ZYXEL compatible transceivers. Toronto, ON - GAO FiberOptics has released a series of ZYXEL compatible transceivers. These transceivers are 100% compatible with Zyxel's original products. GAO FiberOptics transceiver series foll... (08/27/08 09:00 PM)

  45. GAO Tek Inc. has released a series of ZYXEL compatible transceivers. Toronto, ON - GAO Tek Inc. has released a series of ZYXEL compatible transceivers. These transceivers are 100% compatible with Zyxel?TMs original products. GAO Tek transceiver series follow indust... (08/27/08 09:00 PM)

  46. Plastic Playhouses A Hit For Entrepreneur. Great Falls Tribune: Candy Maxwell manufactures and markets Candy’s Colorland products from her Cascade home. The products are made of lightweight plastic, which can be colored on and then erased. The products are manufactured using laser-cutters and silk-screen machines. All of the playhouses are different, but they also can be hooked together. “Kids can add on to it and [...]
    (08/26/08 09:00 PM)

  47. Managing Marketing Performance: The Role of Data, Analytics and Metrics. Performance management has been applied to various parts of a business for quite a long time, particularly when it comes to manufacturing, logistics, and product development. Applying the concept to marketing is finally coming of age. (08/26/08 09:01 AM)

  48. In-Store Retail Advertising Causes as Many Woes as Wows. The Wall Street Journal’s Emily Steel describes the latest in in-store video advertising and RFID. Digital screens have finally become affordable for the majority of stores/ The trick now is to figure out how to use them most effectively: Procter & Gamble is placing radio-frequency identification tags on products at a Metro Extra retail store [...] (08/25/08 09:00 PM)

  49. 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)

  50. Haagen Dazs Viral Vid Sparks Bee-Lovin' Buzz. Associating environmental, social, or political causes with brands isn't just a cheap trend. Done properly, it is also effective: studies say 7 in 10 consumers have purchased a product or service...

    (08/25/08 09:01 AM)

  51. A Business Works To Lower Your Printing Costs. In a business which has been monopolized by some of the best known companies available comes Chris of PrintPrintPrint.biz. Aiming to offer the best quality products possible at the lowest prices available, Chris has started something that will not only catch on but bring with it the potential to become one of the top [...]
    (08/25/08 09:00 AM)

  52. Entrepreneur Creates Shirts “Made In Detroit”. DetNews: One of the big names in Detroit’s downtown music and entrepreneurial scene, Robert Stanzler, 40, recently introduced a new line of T-shirts and outerwear called Detroit Manufacturing LLC. At least 25 retailers have come on board. “Detroit Manufacturing is not just a brand, it is a dynamic product with a Detroit-centric philosophy,” said Stanzler, owner and [...]
    (08/25/08 09:00 AM)

  53. Entrepreneur Creates Shirts “Made In Detroit”. DetNews: One of the big names in Detroit’s downtown music and entrepreneurial scene, Robert Stanzler, 40, recently introduced a new line of T-shirts and outerwear called Detroit Manufacturing LLC. At least 25 retailers have come on board. “Detroit Manufacturing is not just a brand, it is a dynamic product with a Detroit-centric philosophy,” said Stanzler, owner and [...]
    (08/22/08 09:00 AM)

  54. "Sites like Twitter and Facebook will never make much money from advertising: social media users are too busy being social to pa.

    Kunz lists several ways in which Twitter could potentially try to make money, and then systematically takes apart each and everyone of these.

    Twitter could ask users to pay ? but once a free service has already been established, it's hard to get them to pony up.

    Twitter could get messages to pay by selling them as product placement ? users would likely rebel if their tweets were hijacked for text ads.

    Twitter could get money from selling user data ? users would definitely rebel and privacy concerns don't make this viable.

    (08/21/08 09:01 PM)

  55. A Business Works To Lower Your Printing Costs. In a business which has been monopolized by some of the best known companies available comes Chris of PrintPrintPrint.biz. Aiming to offer the best quality products possible at the lowest prices available, Chris has started something that will not only catch on but bring with it the potential to become one of the top [...]
    (08/21/08 09:00 PM)

  56. Gluing EventVue and Twitter Together.

    At Foundry Group, one of our investment themes is Glue.  We've done a handful of investments in this area, including Gnip.  Since Gnip's launch last month, it's been put into production in a number of cases - some obvious, some subtle.  Part of the fun is watching the adoption of it evolve rapidly as we continue to build out the core capabilities of the what Gnip can do.

    I had a long conversation with a VC I work closely with about the value Gnip ultimately provides to its various constituencies (data providers, data consumers, and end users) and how / where it expects to get paid in the long term.  During the conversation, we covered a number of different potential areas, but I realized that my thinking could be much crisper.  That's normal for this stage of a startup as Gnip is still very early stage (we've done one seed round of investment and are gearing up for the next financing) but the exercise of defining a clear business endgame (vs. just a technology endgame) is extremely helpful and self referential, as it creates more focus on what we should actually be building.

    There is nothing quite like an example.  Yesterday, we had the TechStars 2008 Investor and Demo Day.  EventVue - one of the TechStars 2007 companies - provided the online community infrastructure for the event.  They automatically extracted all the data from the registration system and build an online community.  As part of this, members of the community could add their twitter account and - if they had already been a member of another EventVue conference community - like me - would automatically have all their information already in EventVue and wouldn't have to do anything.

    The then created a techstars08 twitter account.  This rebroadcast all the tweets from anyone at the event that had a twitter account set up in their EventVue profile.  However, rather than writing the polling software to Twitter to continually check for updates in the twitter stream, the used Gnip for this.

    EventVue had a data set (I don't know the number - but lets say it was 100 userids) of twitters at the conference.  They wrote a tiny piece of code that monitored Gnip's twitter notification stream.  Whenever someone in the set of 100 usersids appeared in the twitter notification stream, EventVue's handler then queried twitter for that one discrete piece of data and then rebroadcast it on techstars08.

    This took a huge load off of Twitter.  It was much easier code to write for EventVue.  It created a virtually real time twitter rebroadcast stream.  I'm sure I'm missing at least one of the technical nuances - hopefully the guys at EventVue will write up a deeper post on what they did, how they did it, and why it was valuable to them.

    Look for plenty of more thinking out loud from me on our Glue theme as we bring some of the investments we've made into sharper focus.

    (08/21/08 09:01 AM)

  57. How to Use Persuasion in 3 Easy Steps. Quick - name a product or service that doesn't rely on persuasion in some shape or form, to move people to action and sell more goods? Stumped? I can't think of one either. Which is why I k... (08/19/08 09:01 AM)

  58. How an 8-Year Old Became Co-CMO. I have to share this story…it’s about how my Son got offered the job of Co-CMO for Bazaarvoice. Last week we had kids-at-work day. I brought in my 8-year-old Son Kyle and 11-year-old daughter Haley in for half a day to experience what I do at work. They were very excited, however, I had a number of meetings and conference calls. During these meetings my daughter at colored, read, and ate ice cream. My son, on the other hand, walked the halls and started offering advice to our employees. Soon, our Partnerships Director suggested he interview for a job. So, Kyle typed up an introductory letter and and started interviewing with our recruiter and several Bazaarvoice managers. I of course, still have no idea this is going on. Soon Kyle gets into Brett’s office (our CEO). Brett interviews him and soon realizes that his skills of giving “tips, advice and opinions” on things like pricing and how to sell products align well with marketing. So he offers him the Co-CMO position -- actually senior to me -- paying $50/mo and 100 shares! Fortunately I make a little bit more than that. In the video below I compiled some video that I and others collected that day, showing his interview with Brett and examples of the advice that he was giving me and our VP of Business Development, Brant Barton. None of this is staged for video, we just captured what was happening. He came up with all of this himself.... (08/17/08 09:00 PM)

  59. Three Steps to Copywriting. Do you have to compose written material to publicise your new service? Are you struggling to find the right words to promote your revolutionary new product? Here are three steps which may he... (08/16/08 09:00 AM)

  60. Design -- more than quality, technology or top-down strategy ?- is the one factor that can make long-term profits for a company..

    ?Design is the engine that can transform a company into a powerhouse of nonstop innovation,? writes Neumeier of Business Week. "Until now, companies have used design as a beauty station for identities and communications, or as the last stop in a product launch. Never has it been used for its potential to create rule-bending innovation across the board. Meanwhile, the public is developing a healthy appetite for all things design."

    (08/15/08 09:00 PM)

  61. Fast Talk Question - Should retailers like Whole Foods carry the ultimate responsibility for ensuring the safety of the products. Should retailers like Whole Foods carry the ultimate responsibility for ensuring the safety of the products they sell? (08/13/08 09:00 PM)

  62. ?The horizon line for when a newspaper on the street is serving as a kind of brochure of a rich online product does not seem far.

    (08/13/08 09:00 PM)

  63. Getting it Write. Creating a communication to sell your products or services, whether on-line or off-line, has to have the same qualities as a face to face sale. You remember those far off days when you learned how to... (08/12/08 09:00 PM)

  64. Case Study: The Attraction Advantage?How Mexican Mangos Ripened Sales 13% in Four Months. It's a marketer's dream. Customers are so passionate about your product they actually crave it. In fact, outside of the US, your product is the number-one consumed fruit. However, here's where the dream hits reality. You're in the US, where two-thirds of US consumers have never tasted a mango. You've been hired to generate sales during the Mexican mango season?which is only four months long. One thing is crystal clear: You have to get it right the first time. Or mangos will be out of season and you'll be out of a job. That's the situation that our firm, Lewis & Neale Public Relations and JRS Consulting, faced when EMEX, an association of Mexican mango producers and shippers, retaine (08/12/08 09:00 AM)

  65. How TerraCycle Plans to Take Over the Garbage Industry.

    Garbage in, garbage out? This old clich? may become obsolete as trash becomes the raw material of innovation and green business. Upcycling, or turning disposable items into new products, is becoming big business. The leading player in this growing industry is TerraCycle, which makes a variety of products from recycled material: fertilizers from worm poop, backpacks from juice pouches and reusable tote bags from plastic bags. Based in Trenton, New Jersey, the 60-person company had $8 million in sales last year and expects $15 million this year.

    (08/11/08 09:00 PM)

  66. What are to-be-checked characteristics of reliable Copywriting Company?. There is no doubt in the fact that internet is the best way to promote your product and that?TMs too without spending too much of money. There are lots of ways to do so, but, there are few of them whi... (08/08/08 09:01 PM)

  67. The Importance of a Good Online PR Campaign.

    The purpose in writing a traditional press release is to get the word out regarding a new product or service your company is providing. It is also a great way to spread industry news and promote yo... (08/07/08 09:00 PM)

  68. Enterprise 2.0 and Defrag.

    Eric Norlin has a good post up titled Enterprise 2.0 as part of a larger theme.  In it he addresses the question "Is enterprise 2.0 bullshit?"  Eric doesn't think it is, nor do I.  However, there is still a lot of difficultly getting real alignment on what it means, what is unique about the enterprise characteristics, and why anyone should really care.

    I've seeing an interesting and predictable phenomenon occurring.  Corporate IT has gotten energized about implementing "social computing" and "all that Web 2.0 stuff."  The analyst crowd is writing about all the different Enterprise 2.0 categories and starting to extensively position products in pretty matrices.  Several big software companies, including Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle are making major pushes into this "category."  Loads of startups are emerging in every segment.  TechCrunch even has an a new property called TechCrunchIT.

    Early adopters are doing what they always do - pilots, proof of concepts, workgroup deployments.  White papers are appearing.  Web conferences are happening.  Inevitably an "Enterprise 2.0 Conference" (or several derivatives) will appear.

    But Eric and I think something is missing.  What is going round and round as Enterprise 2.0 is a subset of something bigger.  For example, we are in the beginning phase of new issues surrounding the entirety of identity computing and the web.  We are now in a land where people have multiple online personas - their "work self", their "home friend self", their "secret second life self", their "hidden porn login self", and their "this is what I wish I was like self".  While "identity management" has been an endless "IT problem to solve", this isn't really "identity management" anymore - it's "I consume and generate a shitload of data in different contexts that are persistently stored out in the open for all to see - how do I deal with that?"

    I could give another dozen examples of the subset issues contained in what we are trying to explore with Defrag.  I expect Eric will keep banging away on them on his blog.  And - more importantly - I hope you'll come join us at Defrag on November 3rd and 4th in Denver as a group of really interesting and smart people attack some of these issues and try to make sense of them.  If you register this month, use the code "brad1" and get $100 off your registration fee.

    (08/07/08 09:00 PM)

  69. 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)

  70. Proctor and Gamble Shows How a Weak Dollar Benefits US Multinationals. From Bloomberg: Procter & Gamble Co., the world’s largest consumer-products company, reported fourth-quarter profit that rose more than analysts estimated and said earnings may rise further as price increases and the dollar’s declines boost sales. Chief Executive Officer A.J. Lafley’s strategy of raising prices on Cascade dishwashing detergent, Iams pet food and Gillette razors helped counter record [...] (08/05/08 09:01 AM)

  71. Interview With Jon Fox of Intense Debate.

    Allen Stern has a great interview up with Jon Fox, the co-founder of Intense Debate.  Jon and Intense Debate were part of the first year's crop of companies from TechStars and are going great guns right now.  They create the comment replacement system that I use on my blog - if you are a blogger and haven't tried it yet, wander on over to Intense Debate and take a look.

    Jon covers a lot of ground in his interview, but I especially like his answer to Allen's last question: "What tips do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?"

    Jon: I would say two things. First, find yourself a mentor, or at least a friend in the business that can help to get you hooked in. If you don't know anybody yet, reach out to a handful. My experience is that these people are generally more than willing to help, and happy to bring someone new into the mix.

    Second, don't be afraid to just dive in. I realize not everyone can do this, but it's really hard to go half way into the startup lifestyle. Recruiting a team, raising money, building a product, etc all require lots of time and effort and you really can't do it only on the weekend. It's a bit scary at first, but once you get in it's tough to believe you've lived any other way.

    As the second year's group of TechStars' companies gear up for investor day in a few weeks, it's fun to ponder how far some of last year's companies have come.

    (08/04/08 09:01 PM)

  72. Products of Brand Mash-Ups.

    Reebok Kool-Aid Collection

    (08/03/08 09:01 AM)

  73. Being in love is like....

    We had the great fortune to attend the wedding of two wonderful people last night. So wonderful, in fact, that the bride as the person who introduced me to my wife. We owe her a great sum of gratitude!

    The best man's speech included many funny quotes, but this was the best:

    "Being in love is like peeing in your pants. Everyone can see it, but you're the only one who knows what it feels like."


    Gotta love that!


    (08/03/08 09:01 AM)

  74. Sell More When You Sell Some. Often times marketers pass up obvious opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell products and services. When someone buys your product you are handed a perfect way to introduce other products or other ways to get more from your products. I’m always amazed when I open a shipment from someone and it doesn’t have a catalog or flyer [...]
    (07/31/08 09:01 PM)

  75. Where Is My Freelance Copywriter?. Please feel free to use this article as long as credit is given to the resource box. ? Copyright Arthur Levine 2008 Words: 438 Keywords: Customers, Products, Services, Copywriter, Expert ... (07/31/08 09:01 AM)

  76. Biodiesel: Grease Up Your Engines. Drea’s post on McDonald’s grease powering Manila’s police cars reminded me how fascinated I am with the subject of used grease as biofuel. I’m not the only one. This business seems to be taking off all over. Bring on the Brown Grease The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is building a grease-to-biodiesel production facility, that [...] (07/31/08 09:01 AM)

  77. 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)

  78. Copywriting - 5 Steps To Prepare . What sells your product? Too many people build a website with graphics, thinking they will get the attention of prospects that will turn into buyers. Now graphics may get attention, but it's the w... (07/28/08 09:01 AM)

  79. 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)

  80. 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)

  81. I'm Speculating About The Speculation About Oil.

    Having just finished reading George Soros's latest book The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means my brain is now full of his theories around reflexivity.  I have always instinctively agreed with Soros's philosophy even though I find it incredibly difficult and chewy to work my way through (but that's true of all philosophy for me.)

    I'm a great fan of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which, according to my friend Wikipedia, "is the statement that locating a particle in a small region of space makes the velocity of the particle uncertain; and conversely, that measuring the velocity of a particle precisely makes the position uncertain."  Wikipedia suggests that this is often conflated with the Observer Effect (when you observe a phenomenon, you change it), but I think the intersection of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Soros's Theory of Reflexivity reduce nicely in my brain to the Observer Effect. 

    That leads me to the real point of this post, which is the great short article in the New Yorker by James Surowiecki titled Oily Speculations (thanks Amy.)  In the last month a new class of villain has emerged in the rapidly escalating price of oil - the "speculator."  Surowiecki calls bullshit on this (not on the involvement of the speculator, but why this is both irrelevant and why the speculator is not the villain.)

    The key sentence in the article is "Speculation has been a favorite target of politicians looking to mollify anxious voters since the time of ancient Greece, when the orator Lysias protested that wheat traders had reduced Athens to a state of siege.” 

    The conclusion, which Surowiecki bashes us (appropriately) over the head with is "The difficulty for Congress, of course, is that none of the problems that have driven up the price of oil lend themselves to a quick fix, and most, like the boom in global demand and the inaccessibility of certain oil fields, aren’t under our control at all. That’s what makes speculators a perfect target: by going after them, Congress can demonstrate to voters that it understands their pain, and at the same time avoid doing anything that might require real sacrifice from Americans. Our dependence on foreign oil, together with the fiscal fecklessness that has helped reduce the value of the dollar, means that there is no easy way out of where we are. But in an election year that’s hardly a message that anyone in Washington is going to deliver."

    If you net it all out, it's the Observer Effect writ large.

    (07/22/08 09:01 AM)

  82. Do Your Customers Know That You?TMre The Best?. Please feel free to use this article as long as credit is given to the resource box. © Copyright Arthur Levine 2008 Words: 507 Keywords: Customers, Products, Services, Best, Copywriter I w... (07/21/08 09:01 PM)

  83. Excellent Story on the Failure of Monitor110.

    It's unusual for a founder to write a long thoughtful post on the failure of his company.  Roger Ehrenberg - the co-founder of Monitor110 - which shut down earlier this week, did just that on his outstanding post titled Monitor110: A Post Mortem.  The post is oriented around Roger's "seven deadly sins":

    1. The lack of a single, "the buck stops here" leader until too late in the game
    2. No separation between the technology organization and the product organization
    3. Too much PR, too early
    4. Too much money
    5. Not close enough to the customer
    6. Slow to adapt to market reality
    7. Disagreement on strategy both within the Company and with the Board

    Every person in every company that I'm involved with should read this post carefully.  Every entrepreneur should also.  Failure is part of the entrepreneur experience - Roger has done us all a great service by being willing to be deeply introspective and share his thoughts on what went wrong at Monitor110 in such a direct way.

    (07/19/08 09:01 AM)

  84. Warranty Repair and Online Retail Don't Mix.

    My partner Ryan McIntyre has an excruciating story up titled Sharp's Dull Service / My eCommerce Nightmare about his experience buying a snazzy new 52" Sharp Aquos LC-52D92U via Amazon only to have to go through over four months of warranty repair hell before his (now old) new TV worked.  He's being politically correct with his title - I would have titled the post "How To Get Rat Fucked When Buying A High Ticket Consumer Electronics Item From An Amazon Affiliate."  But then again, Ryan is nicer than me.  And he's apparently more patient than me - I simply give my broken things to Ross and order a new improved thing.

    (07/17/08 09:01 AM)

  85. 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)

  86. A Three-Step Product Commercialization Insurance Policy: How a GM Can Overcome the Odds. Bringing a new product to market is one of the most costly and risky activities that any GM faces. Voice-of-the-customer research and stage gate reviews have improved the odds of achieving success. But do they go far enough? Three important tasks are frequently overlooked even though they offer the ability to identify weak links early on. So, how can you overcome the odds? Arm your team with a three-step commercialization insurance policy designed to identify and assess risks. (07/08/08 09:00 AM)

  87. Early Computer Animated Movies.

    I'm knee deep in reading The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company, listening to Pink Floyd, and enjoying a perfect Homer, Alaska evening with Amy.  I was an undergraduate at MIT during the Lucasfilm days of what became Pixar and vaguely remember early Media Lab / Project Athena animation stuff and watching super cool computer graphics wizardry post-SIGGRAPHs at the Computer Museum in Boston.  Fortunately, YouTube has all the old classic computer animations online, including The Adventures of Andre and Wally B.

    Awesome! (the animations and the book).  While sneak peaks of this one and other old Pixar shorts are available on the Pixar website, due to the magic of the Internet they are all available on YouTube.

    (07/04/08 09:00 AM)

  88. 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)

  89. The Most Expensive Way to Grow a Business. There are really only four ways to grow a business – Get more leads, close more deals, increase your average transaction or add products and services to your offerings. Of the lot, trying to generate increasing numbers of leads is the most expensive. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that you drop your lead [...]
    (06/27/08 09:00 AM)

  90. 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)

  91. Intuitive Logo Design?. I’m a big fan of Intuit and all the Quicken and Quickbooks products (yes they also sponsor some DTM initiatives) About a month or two ago they quietly, in my opinion, rolled out a new logo after 25 years with some variation of the old one. I think it’s a pretty nice example of a big company [...]
    (06/12/08 09:00 PM)

  92. How to Avoid Six Common Pitfalls of the Launch Process. Launching new products, services, or segments is the lifeblood of growth for most organizations. Yet, despite its importance, the launch process is often mishandled or assigned inadequate resources. Many of the mistakes that companies make are basic?yet frighteningly frequent and consistent across various types of businesses and industries. Here are six common fault lines in the launch process that very company should look out for. (06/10/08 09:00 PM)

  93. Naming This Just Got Really Interesting I Think. The right name for a product, service, process, company, or promotion can make all the difference in the world. Get it right and you’re on your way, get it wrong and maybe the whole thing’s a dud. (Maybe this goes for kids and pets too.) A new service, still very much in beta, called Name This, [...]
    (06/06/08 09:00 PM)

  94. Brand New Thinking: Put It in Cultural Context. As marketing managers seek to keep their brands fresh and relevant, many are tempted to jump on the latest trends and fads. You know: online and major media advertising with new imagery... new slogans and taglines... new product packaging... all playing to the latest pop-cult phenomena, hot colors, and new vibes. But is that really the solution? The short answer is "no." (06/03/08 09:00 AM)

  95. Five Ways to Optimize Luxury Online Sales Channels. Considering the stakes, it's no surprise that the online sales channel is becoming increasingly important to the bottom line of top-shelf brands as consumers of luxury products and services continue to demonstrate their willingness to spend as much through commerce-enabled Web sites as they do in stores. Despite this trend, many luxury brands continue to separate their online and mainline marketing efforts, confusing customers with disconnected messaging and missing golden opportunities to cross-support expensive marketing initiatives. What few realize is that the best experience?the experience that the customer wants?results when all channels work together and complement each other. H (05/13/08 09:01 AM)

  96. Online Customer Communities Power Routine Innovation. As a result of its online customer community, a company can get much more than basic product feedback. It gains deep insight into the needs of customers, and creates ever-greater customer loyalty by embracing customers as co-designers. Most importantly, the company goes directly to the source for product enhancements, pulling new innovations and ideas directly from the minds of the customers who use, buy, and recommend its products. This is the holy grail of customer-centered product design. Online customer communities can enable the connections, host the conversations, and facilitate the processes that m