THE DREAM IN ACTION

I’m really stoked on Seesmic. Seeing as I don’t have a webcam on my machine or an external one I have been limited in the comments or vids that I’ve made. However, as you can see I’ve enable the Seesmic wp plug-in on the site here and would encourage you to use it. The plug-in allows you to record a short video instead of the standard text comment. Loic Lemeur is the founder of Seesmic and is doing a great job of incorporating other social web tools into the site (ex. Twitter).

I will have more vids and more comments soon because I will be buying a MacBook Pro within the month of May. Loic even commented on the Travis Barker post below. Thanks Loic!

Use it and enjoy it. It may seem creapy to some but embrace the new social web tools and I almost can guarantee that you find them to be useful. See you guys on Seesmic and on ryanagraves.com soon.

My buddies did a little stop-action video this weekend that I got a kick out of and thought was worth sharing.

Good work Tad and Samic.

chilirec is like TiVo for internet radio. You log in, choose your music that you want to record, and within about 5 minutes you have music that has been recorded for you off the internet. chilirec then stores the music in “your personal space” on the web and you can return to listen to it whenever. This service is totally free, however, it is questionably legal (just like this entire genre of services). For you say.no.radio’ers the quality of music is subject to the web radio stations. If you can find good indie channels you will probably be able to record, save, and listen via chilirec.

One awesome feature of the service is that you can actually upload a copy of the playlist you create on chilirec directly to your ipod and listen on the go! No need to be tied to your comp. Awesome. chilirec is still in beta release so check it out.

How it works

for more cool music stuff check out say.no.radio

post inspired by TechCrunch

Seeing as how I was obsessed with Blink in high school I got pretty jazzed on this video… Not the normal type of post but who diggs normal?

Found on say.no.radio

I’ve just added the MyBlogLog widget to ActionsTalk. Be sure to join the community so that you can know who else reads ActionsTalk and we can begin to connect.

I once again feel obligated to apologize for my post bashing the Twitter faithfuls. It is truly an awesome and affective web app! I am now fully on board and would encourage any of you who are not yet sold to try it again. It took me two tries to see how useful the tool could be. I’ve met some awesome people on Twitter and have had some great conversations with existing friends via Twitter.

The next step at least in my head is, how I or others can use Twitter in the workplace? How can Twitter contribute to Enterprise 2.0? Well, Tara Hunt author of horsepigcow.com tells you just how companies can make good use of tweets in the professional environment. Twitter is legit, jump on or get left behind!

Must watch videos of Y-Combinators start-up school.

http://omnisio.com/startupschool08 

David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 08

My take: This guy is a riot and he makes a great great point. Where are the good Italian food placeson the web?

Mike Arrington at Startup School 08

My take: Really, you’re going to have technical difficulties at an event like this? Get your cake up Mike.

Paul Graham at Startup School 08

My take: This man is one of the clearest thinkers in the web start-up space. He gets it. He’s not the best speaker in the world but he is a phenomenal writer and everyone needs to listen to this man.

Paul Buchheit at Startup School 08

My take: Again these guys are hear because they are good entrepreneurs not because they are good speakers. Well worth the watch.

Greg McAdoo, Partner at Sequoia Capital, talks at Startup School 08

My take: He is a partner at Sequoia. You better listen. Also, he really knows how to listen to entrepreneurs. He was the first speaker to do a Q&A (I think).

Marc Andreessen at Startup School 08

My take: Maybe one of the most experiences speakers. Lived through the bubble and the burst and still stand as a successfull entrepreneurs in the web space.

Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.com

My take: The guy started selling books online and now stores millions of companies data. There are plenty of companies that simply wouldn’t exist without Amazons data storage models. Brilliant.

Sam Altman at Startup School 08

Jack Sheridan

David Lawee at Startup School 08

Peter Norvig at Startup School 08

Post compliments of BlakeSamic.comTwo new applications I’ve been impressed with are Piclens and Animoto.

Piclens is a plugin for Firefox that lets you view photos on the web in a new, completely immersive way. Once you have it installed, it integrates with all the major photo sharing sites: Flickr, Facebook, Google Images, Smugmug, etc. With Piclens you can view sets of photos on a virtual wall, and fly through them with a drag of the mouse.  It can make the most boring Facebook album seem interesting.

Watch the demo here, then download it — Trust me.

Animoto is a new site that lets you create amazing videos by combining a group of your photos with some music. I’ve never seen an auto-generated slide show come out so well! You can make the videos for free if you go with a length of 30 seconds, and it’s cheap to make a longer one (~$4). After your video is complete, you can embed it on your website, Facebook, etc. As I sift through 1000’s of pictures from my time in Europe and try to put a video together, I’m thinking it makes a lot more sense to have Animoto do it for me. I would be very surprised if Animoto doesn’t get bought up by Google or Yahoo (think Flickr integration…) in the near future.

Here is my first crack at an Animoto video

Many motivational speakers will tell you that if you tell yourself something over and over you will begin to believe it and once you believe it will become true. Well, I buy into that and I’ve decided to act on it. At the risk of creeping any of my friends or my girlfriend out, I’ve decided to repeat a mantra each morning. I’ve begun to do this on a daily basis and I believe that the results of this practice will come sooner than even I may expect.

Without disclosing anything too personal here on my blog, the gist of my mantra is: this is who I want to be, this is how I’m going to get there. After a long conversation with a close friend we decided that there are better ways to reach your goals than just hoping they’ll come true. You must first believe, truly believe, in yourself before you have any hope of achieving your goals. Then you have to truly believe in your goals.  You must know that they are the right goals for you. The combination of a strong goal and a strong actor behind the goal is the winning combination to achieving successful goals.

So, with a series of “I am” statements I will test out my new found mantra and I will begin to see the positive results in my life.

Y Combinator news is down! Due to the community that is actively involved in Y Combinator it became one of my favorite news feeds to read. The combination of tech and entrepreneurial focus was awesome!  Now…it’s down.  Does anybody know what happened over there?

To go along with my recent acceptance of Twitter, I noticed that Twitter is the 5th largest Rails app. This is an interesting ranking of apps that use Rails. Check out (http://rails100.pbwiki.com/). Being some what familiar with the +’s and -’s of PHP, I’d like to learn more about Ruby and the Rails framework. If anyone out there is great at using the Rails framework I’d love to hear what the experience is like. Why would I use it over PHP or any other language? What flexibility does it give you? Lets keep this discussion going in comments…

It’s OK to build upon someone else’s idea right? Do they own the idea? If someone builds a webapp or a piece of software and stops short or doesn’t follow through with it enough to solve a certain problem, you have the right to pick up the torch and run it to the solution of that problem, don’t you?

Following through on an idea…

ActionsTalk : Their are an uncountable number of applications and sites on the web that are brilliant ideas but it never ceases to amaze me how often people stop short with their idea. I’m guilty of it as well; it’s a very difficult thing to always follow through to the end.  With ActionsTalk for example, when I first set out I had visions of sugar plum fairies and 4 digit monthly checks. I wanted to create the best hub for new start-up founders to collaborate and talk about their ideas, problems, and solutions to the point that the community was inspiring and people would begin to act on their discussions.  The idea is still strong but the motivation (for that project specifically) dwindled. Other ideas came along and motivation and efforts and late nights were dedicated to other ventures. That’s not to say that they idea is dead or will never be revisited but the problem here is obvious, focus. For a project of any kind to be successful their needs to be detailed, intense focus, to the end.

 Beta release – continual improvement: The trend now is that an application can be in Beta release for…ever? Gmail is a classic example. There haven’t been any huge improvements to the UI of Gmail but Google obviously feels it’s a good idea to keep the product in Beta. My guess is that they do this for protection. The product never has to be judged as a final product, the critics are silenced and the developers can focus on the quality and the Voice Of Customer.

 VOC: The voice of the customer is probably the best way to continually develop a product to better the users experience. The problem addressed earlier of not solving the problem can easily be avoided by receiving good VOC.  The users know what they want, they know how they use the product and they see the trends.  They know what add-ons, plug-ins, or features make the product more usable and more efficient so listen to them.  VOC should be collected in many iterations through and after the development process. Feedback is critical from many different type of users. Your own insights will almost never be enough because not every user will behave, use, and judge the product in the same ways that you will.

New tech: The last step is the deadpool. Eventually a product is going to go out of style. Eventually their will be a new technology that makes the old process easier, cheaper, faster, etc.  Sometimes you can leverage to old product with new technology if the principles of the idea are good. For example, SimpleGTD.com.  The to-do list will fundamentally never go out of still. Productivity will always be something that we strive to improve. Making the process “simple” and efficient is why the site is so commonly used.

This is a project is a collaboration between the Interactive Media Division and the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. This video is yet another example of an awesome application of a mash-up of technologies. It will be fun to see the final product.

“Viewfinder” is a novel method for users to spatially situate, or “find the pose,” of their photographs, and then to view these photographs, along with others, as perfectly aligned overlays in a 3D world model such as Google Earth. Our objective is to provide a straightforward procedure for geo-locating photos of any kind, and our approach is to engage a community of users for a certain amount of human help. We specify that a 10-year-old should be able to find the pose of a photo in less than a minute, and we are convinced that this goal is achievable. While we are not entirely there yet, we are getting closer. This is our progress report.

April 3, 2008