Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li of Forrester have written one helluva great book on the state, use and purpose of social media. Called “Groundswell”. It’s current, prescient and useful as can be. There’s a webinar this Friday if you’d care to register.
I have a copy of it coming via inter-library loan but just bought the audio book at iTunes (don’t worry… NOT an affiliate link but WILL launch iTunes).
Does Mrs. Clinton REALLY see Big Oil as her own personal ATM machine? Seems so. From here…
“We can’t just plan for the future, we have to help people in the here and now… We need to go after the oil companies,” she said.
WTF!? How does pilfering the oil industry HELP plan for the future or HELP our citizenry here and now. No, ma’am, “we” don’t need to do any such thing! Why don’t “YOU” give that a go. That’s right. You just traipse your finely polished little self to Houston and try that little exercise on for size. I double dog dare you. That has to be one of the more moronic moves I’ve heard from any of the candidates. Absolutely asinine and irresponsible. Besides, what a wonderful and novel new way to fuel an economy. Pillage and punish performance and the whole motive of free trade in the first place. That plan really scales. Sure… make a profit. But… whoa there fella! Not too much there bub or we’ll have to take some of that back and redistribute as WE see fit.
I call BS! Mrs. Clinton, while you’re at it and in the general neighborhood go to Wal*Mart HQ (you remember the way? or has it been too long since you’ve been back “home”) and sock it to those who brought you to the dance. And, hell, why stop there!?… Just take a tour around the states and sock it to every mom-and-pop you can find reporting a profit of ANY size and fleece them down as well. Oooh, better yet, come to Tulsa and pick me. I’m good for a sound bite (more bite than sound truth be told).
Call me old fashioned but didn’t we declare our independence from The Crown some 200+ years ago over taxation, representation, due process and certain freedoms? Seems to me the “new boss is same as the old boss.”
[EDIT: And to put matters into a more interesting frame... Look at all the MONEY she's accepted from the same oil companies she wants to tear into. Draw your own conclusions. I see an equal opportunity shill.]
Mr. Phil Schiller, chief marketing dude at Apple just landed one monster payday. And, bully for him and well-earned! Hey, Phil, congrats! any chance you could spring for that MacBook Air now? Yeah, the SSD we talked about. I realize the timing wasn’t quite ideal last time I asked… and timing’s everything in such matters… So, how ’bout it? Call me… Email address and phone are ^^^^^^ up there.
My wife, the “Michelle” I blog about, has been working toward a kids line of products for several years now. She’s finally found her niche: Kids accents.
She’s tried a number of things. Some were really fun (and short lived) and others were a grind, no fun and moderately succesful. She’s been on a search for the right product line and has found it…
Hand-painted, personalized accents for kids. (pictured)
I’m a guy and as such miss the nuance and significance. But, apparently mom’s and grandma’s are from a different planet and eat it up.
So, if you’ll do Michelle the teensiest of favors and pass word of her URL and line of stuff along to that special lady near and dear to you… I know Michelle would appreciate it.
FYI. Adobe has officially “end-of-lifed” GoLive. Makes sense.
I LOVE this analysis in the event of a ‘green-light, go’ issuance from MSFT to proceed with their hostile takeover of YHOO.
Having a blow-by-blow (on a BLOG no less!) of how the chess pieces might grind out on the field… just awesome. Better still is the woulda-shoulda-coulda of the board structuring, the poison pill, the two-tier stocks… C’mon! There’s nowhere you’re going to learn that except the hard way or at someone else’s expense.
I was travelling yesterday to San Antonio. An all-day, down and back.
Last week I went to Houston via Southwest Air and had Twittered I wanted to use my iPhone as my boarding pass. Their gate agent wasn’t playing along. So, had to use the paper ticket. (What they do with those is anyone’s guess).
But, yesterday, I prepared to try it again only this time with American Airlines. The morning flights to Dallas and then on to San Antonio were packed. So, I didn’t want to be the one to cause a ruckus. On the way back (San Antonio to Dallas) I asked the gate agent if he thought the PDF of my boarding pass would scan. He said, “I don’t know. Let’s try it.”
And, it worked great!
I asked him if AA had tried rolling anything like that out yet. He said not to his knowledge. He was impressed in the quality of the resolution of the barcode. Then a couple of other guys huddled around and got to thinking their Blackberry’s could display PDFs too… So, who knows… Maybe if enough of us show up and wave our gizmos under the boarding scanners…
I asked the AA gate agent what they did with the paper tickets they sometimes retain and he indicated they were for “audit” of some kind or other.
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My buddies at MetaCarta are hiring and if you have ANY desires to work with a great bunch of folks on a really cool product… give these guys a call. I know Doug, Claudine, Rick and Ron. They’re top shelf and doing great things with the company. Cambridge, MA is where they’re headquartered… right off the MIT campus.
I’ve always wanted to post or share my iChat link. But, couldn’t because of various obstacles. Either the email client didn’t know what to do with it or the web-based platform (in this case WordPress) didn’t.
There is a little known protocol ichat:// (much like http) which you can call from a URI. Example: ichat://geraldb28@mac.com (see? WordPress yanks the ichat:// part off and wraps it up in an http://)
THAT should have created a verbatim link. But, it didn’t. See, WordPress doesn’t play nice with that protocol (or at least recognize it and treat it with the respect it deserves… grumble, grumble).
So, I’ve tricked WordPress into accepting a different input but achieving my end goal. Wolf in sheep’s clothing, sort of. By going to http://www.tinyurl.com/ (see THAT created a link didn’t it!?) and plugging in my ichat://geraldb28@mac.com and creating a TinyURL… See!? That WORKS and you can simply click to launch iChat (if not already running) and voila! we can simply get on with our chit chat.
Share the joy. DIGG it. Whatever. I’m just glad to have taught myself something new today… even if the rest of you already knew how to do it. 
Lots of witty answers to Mr. Wilson being asked if entrepreneurs are happier than others.
To that question I might have answered with the following: “We entrepreneurs are happier even while failing at our own cause than we will ever be succeeding for someone else’s.”
Doing this whole startup-by-night/weekends thing is so IMMENSELY satisfying. I seldom reflect on the amount of ground we’ve covered (yes, gratefully, it’s now “we”) and it’s impressive every time I take a moment to reflect on the progress. At the same time I’m totally stoked by the sheer cliff ahead… whether it’s raising capital (which seems constant) or pumping information into the team or listening to them explain a particular point of view or tackling a particularly thorny business issue or securing a new partner. I have learned more this time around than I ever did with my consultancy.
I will allow myself no inkling of failure. I’m so sold on our ability to create a compelling product a LOT of people are going to benefit from right out of the gate that failure just doesn’t occur to me. I’ve literally vested my retirement in this venture. I’m “all in”. I’ve convinced friends and family to ante up too. In the ‘Art of War’ Sun Tzu likens this to burning the bridges behind your advancing hordes. There’s no retreating home. It’s succeed or fail… spectacularly in either case. There is no other adventure in my life I would pour so much heart, soul, blood, sweat and tears into.
I don’t fret about much (LIE!). But, I do worry sometimes my passion is bottled up and not projecting adequately. I wonder… Do people really “get” my passion and belief in this? I really badly want to be contagious, share the enthusiasm and catch others on fire. It’s turned into a cause or a crusade for me at this point. Not a Don Quixote type quest… more of a Larry Brilliant-type cause. I have found a purpose in this venture like none I’ve ever championed while employed by anyone before. In this, there’s something I badly want to see achieved. Ask me sometime?
So, are entrepreneurs happier? Go tell it to Mr. Wilson…
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