THE DREAM IN ACTION

Keep good company

Just as your Thanksgiving day will likely be memorable because of the friends and family that you have around you, it is critical that you have the right people around you in your startup. The most expensive and most valuable asset in any startup is the people that make up the company. Spend the time and money necessary to find the perfect people to help grow your company and it may be even more memorable than your Thanksgiving.

Stuff the turkey and savor the flavor

Stuff your startup. During such a tough economic time pay close attention to your cash. As much as possible you should stuff away cash so that you can fair the tough times ahead. Many experts think that the severity of the financial crisis to come is all speculation and scare, other experts think that it is an inevitable reality. The point is nobody knows,  and preparing for an unsure time and “weathering the storm” should be your number one priority. Once you’re prepared and have stuffed away enough to get through the recession you’ll be able to focus on the fun/important stuff like company culture and your product. If you stuff your startup full of cash you’re much more likely to be able to savor the flavor of startup success.

Timing is critical

If you pull out the yams 30 minutes before the Turkey is ready you have cold yams. If your stuffing sits for an hour before you stuff the turkey, its not going to sink into the turkey and add the flavor you’re looking for. Basically, without proper timing you can really screw up a Thanksgiving day meal, even if the original cooking was phenom! So, make sure that as you develop your product your communication and marketing strategies are aligned accordingly. Don’t launch a huge traffic generating Facebook campaign for your startup if you don’t have a product ready for users to sign-up. Essentially, don’t let your timing screw up the value that your product brings to the table. The decision to communicate and release your product is a strategic one so plan well and understand that the timing of your release is critical.

Also, understand the seasonality of the startup/venture ecosystem. Make sure to fund raise at the right time and product release at the right time.

 Presentation is worthless, content is king

I don’t care if you pull the finest China, light all the candles, and have pilgrim napkin rings, if the food sucks, you’re over before you started. There is a certain order that your priorities should be in for a startup to work. If the design of your site is a higher priority than the functionality of your product, you might as well leave now. People will ALWAYS forgive square buttons versus round ones or forgive a bad color scheme for a solid working, no bugs, piece of software. People like easy and useful over pretty, every time.

Please vote so I know what you all want from me! Very much appreciated :)

When people think about a “one liner” they usually think of pick up lines. I do. But, pick up lines rarely work – I heard. You bust out a one liner at a bar and you’ll probably end up slapped or alone. If you want to prove me wrong next time you’re at the bar I recommend one of my personal favorites…

Baby, if you were words on a page, you’d be what they call fine print

But it’s probably no surprise that a solid one liner probably won’t work on any self respective female. Where it will work however, with your startup. A solid one liner can provide focus and direction for your company. A solid one liner helps all of your efforts focus on what Guy Kawasaki would call, “making meaning”. In looking at some of the startups that are most influential to me right now it because very obvious to me that having a solid one liner is very important to get the message and the focus right out in the open for all customers and employees to focus on. It will help drive everything from product development to company culture.

- Inbound Marketing System

Hubspots claimed inbound vs. outbound marketing system is what they are all about. The important thing is to be found by the people looking for you vs. trying to find the people who aren’t looking for you. They’re marketing team has done a phenomenal job with webinars for small business owners and strong tools for grading your site or twitter account. Hubspot focuses on improving a companies marketing with a different approach, and it works.

- Easy to use web-based application

No matter how many times you watch Jason Fried speak about software development, or how blogging has helped their company, or why they wrote and now sell the ebook, Getting Real: The Book – The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application, he always comes back to the same thing – Make simple, fast, and useful software. Easy to use web-based application is by no means an official mantra. In fact last week they asked the community on their blog, “how would you describe what 37 Signals does?” So, they clearly don’t have it down to an exact phrase but when the same message is said in different words everytime it still becomes very powerful. Especially when they back it up with great products.

- A little feedback goes a long way

Rypple is a startup out of Toronto that builds a piece of software that promotes and makes feedback simple in the workplace. It’s easy to use and has a great workflow. In fact, it has to be easy to use because the point is for non-Gen Y’ers to embrace more feedback for Gen Y’ers. Rypple’s tag line of “a little feedback goes a long way” is the heart and soul of their software. Make feedback simple to improve the workplace and the work lives of Gen Y’ers who want it.

- Powered by Services

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos has explained that Zappos does not focus on doing customer service but rather making service part of the company culture. “Powered by Services” is a tag line and a mission statement for Zappos and is very accurate. Customer service is not just something that each employee practices but it is the life blood of the company, they truly are powered by a service culture. This has been the focus for Zappos and it is very obvious. Zappos has been highlighted as the go to example for great company culture that has lead to great business success.

Follow the leaders and work on developing your core focus. What is your startups One Liner?

A few months back ActionsTalk spotlighted Daniel Brusilovsky of Teens in Tech. Daniel is a young podcaster who also works at Qik out in the valley. He’s recently launched his company Teens in Tech (TiT, haha) that helps young bloggers and podcaster launch their own, and hosts them. It’s an inevitably growing addressable market and Daniel seems to be the right person to reach them.

Sam Levin and Daniel are launching a Teens in Tech Conference on January 31, 2009 at Microsoft in San Francisco and the conference has a very impressive line-up of teen startup success stories. Jessica Mah who is now a Jr. at Berkley, was one of the younger entrepreneurs when she ran her own enterprise web solutions company before attending Simon’s Rock, the Early College. I highly recommend checking out the Teens in Tech conference. Based on what Daniel has accomplished in the past its bound to be an awesome event!

Here’s the standard copy on the Teens in Tech Conference:

The Teens in Tech Conference is bringing youth the technology together in 2009. The main goal of the Teens in Tech Conference is to show that teenagers are changing both Technology and the World – despite their age. This conference is targeting the teenage audience, as well as companies who want to reach that audience.

The conference was founded by entrepreneur Daniel Brusilovsky, and brought along Sam Levin, one of the Valley’s best consultants to help with planning. Daniel also brought along Social Media experts Erica O’Grady and Adam Jackson on board as well. The Teens in Tech Conference is part of the Teens in Tech Media Group.

“So maybe a recession is a good time to start a startup. It’s hard to say whether advantages like lack of competition outweigh disadvantages like reluctant investors. But it doesn’t matter much either way. It’s the people that matter. And for a given set of people working on a given technology, the time to act is always now.”

—Paul Graham on Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy

Gmail has always catered to the tech elite and now it appears they are catering to my mother. (She loves the colors!) Gmail followed their iGoogle lead and added themes to Gmail! Apparently, this has been one of the number one requests from Gmail users. Personally, I’m still rockin the traditional Gmail theme because I think it’s brings the most emphasis to the actual emails, which incidentally is why I am on Gmail. Just like the iGoogle themes their are dynamic themes that change with the weather and time of day and there is a theme that makes you feel like your using Gmail on MS DOS.

Let me know what theme you are using!

image from cnet news

The online market place will live and live and live. The same ones might not always exist but the concept will always live on the web because of the value that this type of a site adds to its chosen industry; it’s enormous. These are the 5 reason why the online marketplace is hot and will stay that way.

1) People want to buy stuff

Whether you like it or not the US is a spending economy, and sadly I don’t see that changing. Even when the economy is in shambles it’s my guess that when we come out of this recession the savings rate in America will still be horrendous. Regardless of country people need/want “stuff” and they are going to spend for it. If anything online marketplaces, especially those that are an auction, are going to increase during down times because people see these sites as less expensive alternatives to the same end. Why buy a desk in the store when I can find the same one on Craiglist or Ebay for cheaper? As times get tight people will embrace discount focused auctions to consume the same and hopefully spend less.

2) The web leverages a global pool

The value of most web based social solutions is that the web, like no other tool, can extract value from otherwise unreachable areas.  Chicago based, crowdSPRING who is an online market place for creatives and buyers to trade cash for designs has leveraged over 125 countries to reach this goal. It is exactly that kind of reach that will cause an online free market environment to be hugely successful! A web based marketplace gives a voice (power) to both sides of a transaction. If a user doesn’t pay…bad rating. If a seller doesn’t deliver…bad ratings and possible removal from the tool. Similar to the success of many open-source software development projects, when the playing field is opened up the quality of the players drastically improves.

3) Choice

People spend more when they have choices on what to spend it on. When individuals feel like they have control over what they are receiving they feel power and are more likely to spend money. However, I will say that the opposite can be true as well. Many sites have grown strong businesses by offering one and only one product at a time, but ultimately people want choice and freedom on their purchases. If someone can find exactly what they are looking for in an online marketplace they are much more likely to come back and look next time!

4) Customized protection

For any giving marketplace there has to be rules and protections for those involved. Ever heard of the SEC? They impose rules on a little marketplace call the New York Stock Exchange. Without the SEC’s rules imposed on the NYSE investors would never be comfortable putting such huge dollar amounts in that market. The system has to run strict to a set of rules that keep the best interest of the existence of the market in mind first before the interests of any given party in the market.  To use crowdSPRING as an example again, that is where they are so special. Both the companies looking to purchase the work of a designer and the designer want their work to be protected and they want to feel comfortable about how the rewards system will work. If a designer submits something for a client they need the confidence that the money will eventually be delivered which is why crowdSPRING actually holds those funds in escrow until the end of the project. It’s these type of rules and customizations that make this marketplace so valuable.

5) Constant change

A physical marketplace might be able to act as a farmers market Saturday and an art market on Sunday, but an online marketplace can be MUCH more! An online market place can be very specific like Etsy which sells only hand made products or very broad like Ebay. The ability to grow quickly but stay very customized and specific is one of the most powerful things an online market place has to offer. Adaptability is something that any developing business model needs to have. You never quite know what your customer base is going to demand of you, and you need to be able to respond. If they want a legal contract behind their transactions in order to protect them than so be it…crowdSPRING does!

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I’m sure this isn’t everything. I’d love to hear other reasons you think online marketplaces will or will not continue to be huge on the web.

Bottom up is the way to grow anything these days. Construction workers have know this for…well, forever. Surprisingly the idea of bottom up growth is just getting around to startups, politicians, and corporate America… probably in that order.

37 Signals

When Jason Fried, founder of 37 Signals was first building his company he was inspired by chefs. He shared at a talk recently that he found it interesting that even though chefs have all these cooking secrets they don’t hesitate to share them. Chefs write books about their secrets and host TV shows giving their secrets away. Their “secrets” became their product! This appeals to any individual. Myself for example, with no cooking stills at all (my gf can attest), am very intrigued by some cooking shows just because they are teaching me to be the expert. In reality what they are doing is giving me the power of information. This power of information is what reaches and appeals everyone. I don’t know anyone that doesn’t want the power of information. What Jason discovered is that empowering people with information can create a huge following or audience and that audience becomes a few things:

• a powerful marketing team
• a powerful support team
• a very powerful and lucrative customer base

This realization has helped 37 Signals to become a very profitable software company with a huge audience on its chosen communication platform, their blog Signal vs. Noise. This ground up approach, starting not with big name software publications or traditional “respected” media, but with their own blog that anyone could subscribe to proved to be hugely successful.

Building Obama

The next, perfect, example of embracing bottom up growth is the completely unexpected win of PE Barack Obama in the presidential election 2 weeks ago. There has been no shortage of coverage on how PE Obama has utilized non-traditional media to build a huge following of over “8,000 Web-based affinity groups, 750,000 active volunteers, and 1,276,000 donors“. It certainly shows that by reaching out through social media tools DIRECTLY to the people and not only through debates, press conferences, and traditional media PE Obama was able to create a loyalty to his cause maybe stronger than any in the past. He certainly was the first to use technology is such a huge way during a presidential campaign. Whether it directly affected votes I’m sure could be debated but certainly through donations his involvement and attention to this group had an enormous and undeniable effect.

As startups may have realized this trend first, as is normal in the tech world, the political world has now shifted in the realization that reaching the “common man” directly is a very powerful act. Daniel Debow, CEO of Rypple, wrote in his recent Huffington Post blog post:

I think Obama’s improbable election will be the final “evidence” point that convinces the business world that they need to understand the change that is coming to their way.

I believe this to be very true. Adapting to change is what keeps a business alive at any level and smart corporations must and will react to this shift.

GE opens up to bottom up

Just as getting into politics on this blog is something that I almost never do I’m going to comment on my employer General Electric because it has recently made moves towards embracing bottom up growth that I totally respect.

GE recently launched a site called GEreports.com. GEreports is basically a blog for GE. They cover anything from how much the company is spending on it’s revolutionary ecoimagination campaign, to posting talks from CEO Jeff Immelt (which are really awesome in person). They share recent new products from all of the different GE portfolio businesses and overall does a good job of showing the public (the bottom) what they are up to. I’m sure the growth of GEreports.com will not sky rocket right away but as large corporate blogs grow and as companies let their communications departments have a bit more freedom and openness I think that they could become very powerful communication platforms for the general public, investors, and in my case…employees.

This last move from closed to open and from top down to bottom up that is beginning in corporate America is a bit surprising to me, but very encouraging. As we grind through a very tough economic state we see a call for great regulation and disclosure from corp America. The start of blogs and other communication platforms from corporations to the public will do nothing but encourage this sort of open and honest behavior. I’m not naive enough to think that if a corporation has a blog it means they are immune to scandal. However, what it does mean is that at least someone inside the organization understands the importance of reaching to the bottom without using traditional, slow, and overly scrubbed media to inspire openness and growth.

Image by graves.ryan via FlickrI’ve just finished re-reading the ‘The Art of Bootstrapping‘ chapter in The Art of the Start and 3 main focuses stood out to me. I want to elaborate on why they stood out to me and why they are the most important underlying themes in this chapter. If you’ve not yet read the book I encourage you to.  I use it as a startup reference guide and a motivator because it truly does inspire a positive attitude for an entrepreneur when questioning your plan of action.

Get the job done.

The first step is just to execute. Without the constant focus on execution in your startup organization you will inevitably waste time and money. Being efficient with those two resources are the ultimate key to good bootstrapping! It is extremely rare that a startup succeeds because of the idea. However, it is common that a startup succeeds because of its ability to execute with a good team. Go out and get the job done with what you have, just do it. Swoosh.

Get the job done fast.

Remember to the two critical resources to bootstrapping? Time and Money. Both are critical in building a startups product and team. Money is the obvious because unless you raise capital you only have so much of it. And, time is critical because whether you think there is or not, someone else is out there trying to do the same thing. Finding creative ways to minimize your spend is the strategy part. Offer equity, or creative vacation schedules for lower salaries, in short, do what you have to do to last. These things are critical now that the economy is in the state it’s in.

Focus on functionality and ignore imperfections. If you create your product to get the job done and do what it is intended to do you will be able to find people to use it, and hopefully pay for it. It is absolutely ok to have your first customers paying or not to be your first production testers. Paying customers will absolutely give you feedback, it will come fast and heavy but it will be the feedback you need to then create and awesome product.

Invest in what got the job done.

The gist here is reward what worked. If your incentive structure is what got you great people continue with that. It will be worth giving up small shares of equity for the right people early on. These are the people that will be the foundation of growth for your startup.

Invest in great individuals. Right now everyone seems to be laying off as if its the cool thing to do. Well if your next hire brings more value to your organization than the $$ you would have saved by firing someone, then no need for layoffs. Find the people that will bring big value to your company. In this economy there are a lot of valuable people looking for jobs…see this as an opportunity!

Final Thought

I’ve said this a lot recently, but right now is a great time to startup. It’s an even better time to bootstrap. Follow Guy’s advice, start as a service if you have to, I am. Just get going and focus on executing quickly and getting the job done. Then reward what got the job done.

A good friend of mine Dave Cohn (who has also contributed to ActionsTalk) launched a project that he has been working on for 6+ months this week. Spot.Us is coined as community funded reporting and is a result of a grant Dave received from the Knight News Challenge. Dave is a very accomplished journalist having written for Wired Magazine and graduated from Columbia University. His passionate for the future of reporting is inspiring and he is dedicated to the end goal of improving the current news reporting model.

With Spot.Us users can log in and donate to have a certain topic reported on. If a news station donate they must donate over 50% in order to have exclusive rights to that story. If the amount donated go’s over the needed amount users get credit towards their next donation to Spot.Us.

Spot.Us is a nonprofit project of the Center for Media Change. We are an open source project, to pioneer “community funded reporting.” Through Spot.Us the public can commission journalists to do investigations on important and perhaps overlooked stories. All donations are tax deductible and if a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, your donation will be reimbursed. Otherwise, all content is made available to all through a Creative Commons license. It’s a marketplace where independent reporters, community members and news organizations can come together and collaborate.

… David Cohn has worked with journalism luminaries such as Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis. He has been working in the citizen journalism movement since 2005 on projects like NewAssignment.Net, Assignment Zero, Beat Blogging, and Off The Bus. He also co-organized the first and second Networked Journalism Summit. Spot.Us is informed by the growing citizen journalism movement. Spot.Us is an attempt to ensure that journalism remain a strong and vital part of our local democracies as a participatory process, not just a product.

This site, due to Dave’s location has launched only in San Fran, but I’m sure with the attention that this project is sure to received they will be in other cities soon. Make sure to check out Spot.Us and Dave’s blog!


Spot.Us – Community Funded Reporting Intro from Digidave

As SocialDreamium works to build a customer base with both the service side of our business and the product side of our business we will use the philosophies shared here by CEO of 37Signals Jason Fried.

I truly believe in having examples that you follow and learn from 37Signals will be that example for SocialDreamium.

I know that every blog on the planet is going to have a post about how Google adds video chat but I thought that if its something that interests me and its something that will change the tools I use to communicate on the web I would still write about it. Bear with me…

Google’s new chat service looks to be amazing. In all of my testing of video chat tools for ActionsTalk I’ve found that iChat on the Mac has the best video quality and Skype video chat is the quickest (less delays). Now I’ve tested Google chat against those two tools on those two criteria and it wins both. The video quality is really amazing especially when you keep the view at the default size (full screen is pretty sweet though). Also, the speed of the video is phenomenal! Blake and I use video chat all the time to collaborate on startup projects and I think we’ve found the tool that will replace the others. We used it for about an hour and it did freeze once though…I hardly consider this a FAIL…it’s early.

I’ve not tested out the record functionality yet but it looks like it is there… and the view yourself window if very flexible with sizing (a plus for recording).  I’ll definitely be giving Google video chat my attention over the next few days!

A quick note about Google: They seem to be able to enter a market so quickly and with such huge force. It is very possible that because of the large number of users on Gmail, services like Skype will have significant drops in users. Google is currently and will be for sometime a very scary force for ‘almost’ any startup. A startup can work for months or even years and spend tons of money on developing a product and can be put to rest in a matter of days if Google enters the market, BEWARE. However, startups should also see this as a huge opportunity. Why you ask? Because if Google wants to enter a market and you have a leading product $$$aquisitions bells start ringing$$$. The lesson here is beware and prepare Google ain’t slowin down.

Let me know what you think of the new Google video chat. Better, worse, better in some instances?

Today I was introduced to a new product that could change the way feedback is given and received in the workplace. After writing about what is important to Gen Y employees and how employers are going to have to respond to these changes, the founder of Rypple (pronounced “ripple”) reached out to talk about their new product.

In short, Rypple works to take away the difficulty of giving and receiving feedback in the workplace. However, at the same time they are addressing a critical requirement in professional satisfaction…the feeling of personal, yes PERSONAL development. There is a huge difference between ones need for personal development and ones need for professional development. The main difference lies in the fact that in this day and age people don’t always know what their next profession may be. For example, I could work as an artist, loving my creative freedoms, loving painting, and loving the industry but perhaps the greatest skill I take away from the work is my ability to sell the artwork? (I understand that I’m probably butchering the beautiful profession that is being an artist, my apologies) The same principles may apply elsewhere. If I’m growing my sales skills I can apply those skills to literally any industry. I see these developments as personal developments, where in the example professional developments may be my improved ability to paint using oils vs. another medium.

As there is an increased focus on personal development in the workplace someone or some tool needs to facilitate that change. Rypple has set out to do just that. This tool simplifies the process of asking for feedback from ones peers or managers. In a very clean and intuitive interface you can take micro-polls on your performance. Whether it’s on a sales pitch or project meeting you solicit and receive anonymous feedback. You can tag your question/poll and then your peers will “grade” or rate you on those tagged attributes. This way you can track your improvement on certain topic areas over time. This is the exact type of direct and continuous that Gen Y is looking for!

As your co-workers receive our micro-poll they rate you 1 to 5 on your topic categories and give you both positive and constructive feedback. Again this is all anonymous and the person giving the feedback knows exactly how many people you asked for feedback. This allows them to decide just how candid their feedback should be. Naturally, the more people you ask for feedback the more honest ones feedback will be.

The tool also allows you to track all of your feedback. It knows how many people you asked for each micro-poll and it knows what attributes or topic areas you tagged to each poll. Then it creates a “cloud tag” like tracker for your attributes. The attributes (see right) will be larger the more times you ask for feedback on them. You can always go back to tool and check your ratings on a specific event or on a specific attribute. These will be very helpful in identifying your goals over a period of time and relating specific work events to those overall goals.

Lastly, any good web application today must have a social aspect to the site. As you invite reviewers to grade/rate you on micro-polls the tool will save those contacts. You can tag the type of relationship you have with that individual and even group them. You can include them as ‘All Managers’, ‘Direct Reports’, or simply ‘colleague’s’. You can even important contacts from outside tools like Outlook. This removes the dreaded hassle of populating yet another social web app.

What is very appealing to me about Rypple is that it’s not just the Gen Y crowd who will be able to easily adapt to using this tool. As long as the “boomers” realize the need for better feedback in the workplace, they will realize the simplicity of using Rypple. It’s a very simple workflow and due to it’s email integration no other site or instance needs to be used to give feedback.

Yesterday I had an awesome conversation with Daniel Debow, co-founder of Rypple. Daniel is also a Huffington Post blogger, and former VP of Corporate Development and Marketing for Workbrain. It is obvious to me that he and his startup are focused on the right things! As I read his bio I was blown away as he has his JD & MBA from U Toronto, and a masters degree in Law, Science, & Tech from Stanford. He has successfully helped build and then sell Workbrain and now is focusing on a HUGE need in the workforce…personal development.

I’m going to be using Rypple in a small team at work and hopefully in a few weeks I’ll be able to write a post-use review of the product with an improved insight into its usability and overall use. In the meantime if you’ve used Rypple or are interested in trying out the product please comment below and I will set you up either Daniel or a product key. Cheers.

Image by Cia de Foto via FlickrWhen I worked at my consulting job in Chicago about 2 years ago I had a conversation with my boss about how Gen Y will affect the workforce and how our attitudes towards career will affect growing businesses. I’ve had my opinion about it for quite sometime but it is tough for a successful business owner to hear from a 20 something that they need to change their hiring strategy. The right thing to do is to ask “us” how we feel about certain issues, but the hard thing to do is listen.

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures was interviewed for BigThink a few months back and recently posted the interview on his blog. A topic that came up in the middle of the interview stuck out to me because Fred shared the exact advice I gave to that boss a couple years back.

Fred said:

“This generation is going to be a different kind of workforce than the ones businesses have known in the past.”
“This generation will be a lot less loyal. They will be interested in maximizing the value of their career vs. the value of stock of the company they work for, unless they own or control that stock.”

“This is a mercenary workforce.”

“This transition is already happening in tech industry. Software engineers are being poached similar to the way a film star would be offered a better contract to work for someone new.”

“That mindset about talent is what this generation is all about. They are going to be building their own personal brand, own personal career, and portfolio of what they can do, then they will put themselves out to the market to the highest bidder.”

If you aren’t in the Gen Y category you’re probably thinking, “Those spoiled brats with their entitlement issues!”, and you may be right… However, whether we are right or wrong in our thinking this is definitely the sentiment among us. The reason this is so important is because YOU HAVE TO ADAPT! It is absolutely critical for any company whether you are GE, Google, TechCrunch, or startup XYZ to know where the workforce is going and what your employees will want from you. Without them you will not have a business so the fact is, they are more important than even your customers.

Today I watched a short TED video of an incredible software demonstration from Anand Agarawala, the co-creator of a new desktop interface called BumpTop. He goes on to explain his dissatisfaction with the standard point and click desktop interface that “windows” has instilled into our expectations. “You can sex it up, with a Mac” Anand says, but still its relatively boring.  This new interface does a damn good job at replicated a physical desktop is very impressive. It seems, from the demo that they thought of everything…

In the image below which is a BumpTop desktop, you can see that you can stack, group, spread, tilt, stretch, bundle, heap, mound, pack, or sheaf any of the documents, apps, icons, images, notes, or files. The ability that this software has to integrate the physical reactions that would occur on a real desktop are phenomenal.

Then if you watch the demo (which I would highly recommend) you’ll see that you have the ability to throw, grab, tumble, push, barrage, sort, pull, crumble, or discard any of the documents, apps, icons, images, notes, or files.

Now, why could this new interface be huge huge huge vs. just pretty cool? The combination of multi-touch computing with an interface like this could completely take away the need for a mouse! Imagine if I could just place three fingers or all five on a multi-touch surface and organize my desktop? Nothing will ever completely replicate reality but the combination of a slick interface like BumpTop and slick tech like multi-touch, amazing things could happen!

If you develop this I want 1%  :)

Update: Here is the link to download the beta of a test BumpTop I’m not sure if this is actually BumpTop software or not!

http://www.download.com/Real-Desktop-Light/3000-2340_4-10691227.html