July 2010
23 posts
Swipen with the Swipely
I started using a new social sharing service called Swipely a few weeks ago. The service takes charges on your credit cards and allows you to expose them to a sort of Facebook like news feed. Now before you freak out about privacy, they give you enough control on what you want to post and strip out private information so basically people can just see where you were and when you were there.
It...
“You have to do what it takes to have your company succeed. A great tip would be...”
– Joseph Sunga Biz Dev Manager at TeachStreet
This quote comes from his larger post, 5 Lessons Learned While At Teachstreet.com. It is a awesome post and worth a read of the entire thing. This quote really stuck out for me though. Typically the biggest excuse in getting anything out in a start up...
A Really Great Movie
Last night I went to the screening of Erin’s newest movie Ramona and Beezus based on a series of books written by Beverly Cleary. I am definitely not the target audience but it was really fun and the movie had a great flow to it.
Erin worked really hard on this movie, it was a project that was many years in the making. In Variety (a prominent industry magazine) they said,...
The Lottery of Startups
Last week on a hike with friends I was explaining to someone how my view towards startups is that I am never going to win the lottery. What I meant by this is that I am never expecting some crazy break away success to happen to me. So I always build with a rational model that will work with low investment to test the idea and even get to break even before too much investment is incinerated.
...
Is .Com Dead?
This weekend while on TechCrunch I saw this ad from GoDaddy about the new domain extension .co:
There is an ever increasing amount of Generic Top Level Domains (GTLD), as of right now there are over 20, these include extensions like .info, .jobs and .biz. In addition to the generics each country has a domain, for example bit.ly uses Libya’s extension .ly and VC blogger Mark Suster uses...
A New Form of Real Estate for NYC
If you have ever had a car in New York City, then you know it can be a miserable experience. Even for the people living in the city, very few buildings due to their age have parking so many people have their cars in lots that are a few blocks away. This is especially true on the upper west side where I used to live.
When I was in the South of France a few weeks ago and saw these interesting...
“I don’t think it’s worth the cost. Anything more than free is too...”
– Cal Lacasse, an aerospace industry sales executive from Flower Mound, Texas, from the USA Today article on internet on planes.
I wish I knew what aerospace shit this guy sells, so I could call him up and tell him to send me a some of his stuff for free. Wifi on the plane is awesome and has changed...
3 tags
Stalker Ads
Online advertising relies heavily on the concept of relevance. The better a company can figure out the relevance of a ad to you, the higher percentage they will convert.
I am heading to Monterey, CA for a weekend trip so yesterday I was looking for rooms on Expedia. Afterwards I went to TechCrunch and clicked on a blog post. This is what I saw:
Notice the Expedia ad in the bottom right...
TOUT: Behold The Taga Bike →
Saw this on my friend Leah’s blog, Tout.
What a great solution for people living in cities with kids. I love seeing well designed products like this that are a real solution to a problem. If we lived in a less hilly place I would buy one of these in a second.
“A healthy and competitive market brings investment, customers and ad dollars to...”
– Evan’s Blog. Meh.: James Siminoff: Crossing the Line
Evan did a better job explaining my crossing the line post. He is so right, “speaking poorly of your competition when you are attacking from below means you have nothing good to say about yourself”
(via david-noel, david-noel)...
Crossing the Line
Successful startups and markets usually draw competitors. Competitors in turn fight it out for market share. This is both normal and OK.
However not everyone knows how to fight. A good metaphor for this would be rattlesnakes. The only rattlesnake that will kill you on the spot is a baby. The younger the snake the less control it has in regulating its venom so it basically shoots too much...
Microsoft Contacts Next of Kin
I realize that big companies are a bit crazy and therefore sometimes make decisions that look really stupid to the outside world but in reality are good decsions for the company. Todays decision by Microsoft I am sorry to say just looks like a bad one.
Microsoft launched their “social phone” called Kin about 2 months ago. Today they announced that they are killing the entire...