I will no longer be posting to this blog. I have moved over to my new address at 15 Meanings (www.15meanings.com) . This place has served it's purpose, to get me into the groove of blogging, now it is time to move on to bigger and better things! This new site will be my home for the foreseeable future. I will continue to ramble on about my opinions on the web community, hot companies, and my life, as well as any other nonsense I can think of.
Thanks,
Will
For those of you who had not seen the previews for Fox's new show, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader, then you may be excused. If you did see the previews and did not watch the premier last night, then you should be ashamed, very ashamed. This is quite possibly the funniest, most hilarious show going right now.
It is hosted by Jeff Foxworthy, of the You Might be a Redneck fame (for the record, I have not seen any of his shows, but I do know who he is), and he does a pretty good job of humiliating the contestants (the adults, not the 5th graders), although the two that were on last night did a pretty good job by themselves. The premise is that contestants compete for a million dollars, but they have to answer questions ranging from 1st grade history to 5th grade science.
Seems easy enough, right? Wrong! The first contestant last night was unable to answer his first 3 questions (that is as far as he got) on his own. That is just down right terrible when you consider he was a 40 year old college graduate from UCLA who majored in US History. Side note, one of the questions he missed was a US History question, how ironic!
To give you an idea of some of the questions that were asked, here are a few:
I recently met Noah Kagan of OkDork (as well as Entrepreneur27), very cool guy I might add. His blog is one of the better ones I have read, and he has a very cool feature on his blog that really embraces the whole attitude of community involvement and user generated content. He has a section titled User Generated Tuesdays, where every Tuesday he posts a blog entry by one of his readers. Very cool concept, I like it a lot. He has a very good reader base (1100+), so it is a great way to get your writings in front of a bunch of eye balls. Anyways, today was my day to shine, as he posted a blog entry written by me! If you want to read it, go here......
I know a lot of people have been posting about Startupping recently (Fred Wilson and Ross Mayfield to name a few), so I thought I would jump on the bandwagon. This is an excellent site chock full of nuggets for those entrepreneurial types looking to get a foot in an otherwise exclusive club. It was created by Mark Fletcher, who is a successful serial entrepreneur (thank goodness, it was started by someone with some cred). There are four main areas of the site, all of which are extremely useful. Theres the blog, discussion forums, WIKI and a blog aggregator. The blog contains a lot of useful posts by those people who have been there before, in the trenches, who know what works and what doesn't. There have already been two posts by John Batelle in one week, very impressive! According to Mark, the discussion forums are the heart of startupping. Great place to get advice on anything from should you accept VC funding to upcoming industry events that you should not miss. The WIKI contains helpful pointers to outside resources, from legal document templates to term sheets. The last section is the blog aggregator, which I find extremely interesting. Mark has created a one stop shop for all of the top blogs of VCs, angel investors and entrepreneurs. If you are looking for the money, you should start reading here!
I truly believe this site is going to be a main stay, anyone and everyone who is trying to start a company these days (who isn't, right???) should be on here!
Interesting article has just been posted on TechCrunch titled "Netvibes Promises Cross-Platform Widget Compatibility". The widget marketplace is quickly becoming the hot topic for 2007, and the fact that there is a multitude of widgets that run on various platforms, it is easy to see that this is a fragmented space. There are already a few companies out there that are attempting to overcome this fragmentation, to mention a few: ClearSpring, and WidgetBox and now it seems that Netvibes is throwing it's hat into the ring as well. This is an interesting play, considering that Netvibes is one of the platforms that widgets run on. They do have a pretty slick product right now, but to my knowledge, all of the widgets they have available on their site do not run on any other platforms.
The W3C is apparently working on a draft for a universal widget specification, but I wonder if the Netvibes spec will become the standard by default? Nonetheless, this should shape up to be an interesting space and I hope that a standard is settled on so we can take our widgets where ever we want!
I just read through the presentation that the guys at Dogster (Ted Rheingold, John Vars and Steven Reading) gave at the CommunityNext Conference last weekend at Stanford. Unfortunately I was not there in person (trust me, I wanted to go, but it was out of my hands, but I digress) to witness it firsthand, but the I imagine the web version is almost as good!
The presentation is titled "Community is Your Most Valuable Asset" and it discusses why those guys feel (and I would venture to guess they are pretty dead on considering their successes) that you live and die by your community. They highlight several key points on how to stay connected with your community because at the end of the day, without them, you are left with just a bunch of code.
A few weeks back, I wrote a post about the blogs that I read. I still am sticking to those blogs, but I have found a few others since then, and the most notable one is KillerStartUps.com. One could argue that it is similar in nature to Mashable, VentureBeat or even TechCrunch in that it is a review up and coming Internet companies, but that would be an unfair comparison. Whereas Mashable, VentureBeat and TechCrunch have a staff of bloggers writing about companies that they either receive tips on, know someone there and are returning a favor, or have researched the companies themselves, KillerStartups is a community for the people by the people. What I mean by this is that it is a user driven internet startups community. It’s intended for entrepreneurs, investors, and bloggers to stay updated on new internet startups. Companies are submitted along with a quick write up and they can be voted on whether or not they will succeed. There is a good amount of information on the companies, along with some interesting opinions on the viability of said company. If you are in the industry and need to stay up to date on new companies, add this site to your stable of places you go to for industry information.
Yesterday, I attended an interesting presentation by Anne Collier and Larry Magid of BlogSafety.com. They came to my work to discuss their new book, MySpace Unraveled. I went into the presentation with the expectation that they would be discussing specific cases that MySpace has been confronted with (child predators, bullying, etc.) and how MySpace has delt with it. Given that I am a product Manager for a social networking product, I tought I would be able to take away a few key points that we could implement for our product to increase our overall safety for underage children.
Instead, what we got was a more general discussion around web 2.0 and general facts of what is taking place in this new landscape and some proposed legislation on the table to really restrict underage children's usage of the new web. With that being said, I did think that the larger point they were trying to make, and one in which I totally agree with (more so now that I am a parent), is that we as technology companies can make all the technologies in the world to protect our children and we can institute all sorts of laws to protect them, but they will find a way around it. What we as a society need to do, and this is where I think their greatest point was, is do a better job in parenting. It really all comes down to this, if we spend more time with our children explaining to them the dos and dont's, what is right and wrong, and instilling better morals in them, we may not have as great of a problem on our hands as we think we do. With our busy lifestyles, I think society as a whole has gotten away from this, and instead look for reasons as to why these things are happening instead of taking a look at ourselves and thinking for a moment that perhaps if we spent more time parenting and less time placing blame on everyone or everything else, that these things may not be happening. Absentee parenting is the problem, and we need to focus out time an attention on fixing this first!
I have to admit, I have been a bad global citizen and have not paid that much attention to the whole Global Warming hoopla that has been gaining steam lately. However, that all changed last week when my wife and I decided to stay the night in (like we really have a choice with 3 year old triplets in the house) and thought it was a good idea to watch Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth". For the record, I did vote for the Clinton / Gore ticket in 1992 and 1996, however I countered that by voting for the Bush / Cheney ticket in 2000 and 2004. Needless to say, my political allegiances are all over the map.
After watching the movie, we both walked away with the feeling that Gore may be on to something here. There are some hard, cold facts that cannot be denied. I will not go into all of them here, I suggest you just watch the movie and decide for yourself. If the facts that he discussed in the documentary were not enough, the Mercury News has an article today stating that there is over a 90% certainty by the experts that humans are the cause of global warming. If you want to read the article, click on this title "Experts send strongest message yet on warming" to take you there.
I will close with this, there is definitely something strange going on and we all need to pull our own weight if we want a world to be left for our children.
I admit it, I do read Guy Kawasaki's blog on a regular basis. Sometimes I find his posts to be slightly off topic (at least for me), but other times I find them to be incredibly insightful. His latest post, "The Top Ten Stupid Ways to Hinder Market Adoption", provides a pretty good summary on surefire ways to slow down / hinder / eliminate market adoption of your product (provided that it is a web based product, but I am sure you can extrapolate out some of these and apply them to your product if it is not). For the details, read the article, but here is the high level summary so you get the gist (reader's note: he actually lists 14 ways even though the article is titled 10...)
This is an interesting twist on the whole social networking space. It provides users with a place to place and manage small, friendly wagers. Not only can you browse interesting bets, but you can also make a bet, create a new bet, as well as a whole host of "given" social network activities.
This is how it works: Users set up bets, either for actual money or for the Gottabet currency (called “peanuts”) which have no cash value (but give bragging rights). Gottabet (UK based) is also a social network - all users have a profile page. Users are rated not only by how many peanuts they gather but also on their reputation.
If you are in to friendly wagers, then this site is worth checking out!
As I stated in a previous blog entry on the blogs that I read, Guy Kawasaki always has interesting insights and thoughts on business. His most recent post, "Is a Business Plan Necessary", delves into the debate on whether or not a business plan is necessary in order to be successful. The post is his two cents in regards to the article in the Wall Street Journal discussing a recent study done by Babson College on the subject matter. The study analyzed 116 businesses started by alumni who graduated between 1985 and 2003. Comparing success measures such as annual revenue, employee numbers and net income, the study found no statistical difference in success between those businesses started with formal written plans and those without them. Very interesting indeed, however, Guy makes the point that if it is your intent to raise funding (which these days a lot of people need), you will need to craft a business plan. He does offer hope though, that instead of it being a dissertation and taking you a year to produce, it should be no longer than 10-20 pages and should not take you more than a couple of weeks. For more details on Guy's approach to business plans, click here.
I came across this article today, and it struck a cord with me. It is titled " Fed-Up Parents Reject Elaborate Birthdays" and discusses the growing trend in this country to "one up" the children's birthday parties and how it is becoming a real problem. It goes on to recount some real horror stories of parties gone wrong, but the overall message of the article is that this is a growing problem and there is an organization that has been founded to counter this problem. The organization is called Birthdays Without Pressure, and it is worth checking out. They offer up a lot of advice on stress free parties and alternatives to the expensive parties that are taking place at a break neck pace in this country.
If you have children, this article is well worth reading and the web site is well worth a look as well.
I consider myself an avid reader of all things news related, and I have recently gotten into reading a variety of blogs that are more industry related (Internet that is) as well as a handful of VC blogs as well. Below is a list of the blogs I keep tabs on an a thought or two on each:
I bought this book back before Christmas, and have not gotten too far into it. It is titled "Getting Stoned with Savages" (available here from Amazon) by J. Maarten Troost. I would classify it as a travel memoir, comical at times, dry and hard to read at others. I thought it was going to be similar to "Driving over Lemons" by Chris Stewart (another travel memoir writer), but it is not. I read Stewart's book back in the summertime, and it was a pretty good read. I will continue on with this one, but at the rate I am reading, it may be next Christmas before I finish it!
For Christmas, I got a new CD that is well worth sharing. It is by Wes Tucker & The Skillets, titled "Beauty in the Broken". I know what you are thinking, can it be good if it has the word skillet in the band's name? Do not be fooled by the quasi silly name of the band, they are for real and very legit.
I am not sure how I came across this band, but I am sure glad I did. According to the band's web site, they shift from folk rock, to funk, to gospel, to soulful ballads in the space of a set list, drawing comparisons to artists like Ben Harper, Jack Johnson and Bob Dylan. I am a huge Ben Harper and Jack Johnson fan, and would put them into that category with a definite dash of Bob Dylan like folksy flare. They are from the Washington DC area, so if you get a chance to check them out, you will not be disappointed!
The New Year has been upon us now for almost 2 weeks and I have not made a blog entry. Shame on me! I have been busy, things are gaining full speed at work, the kids are keeping us on our toes at home, and other than that, I have no other excuses (are any needed really???).
Anyways, I just wanted to take a quick moment and make an entry and say that there is something exciting that I want to share, but I cannot do it just yet. Give me a little more time and I will spill the beans!
