THE DREAM IN ACTION

I’ve really stopped blogging here, go read ryangraves.org

Typically I leave this Apple fan boy banter to others. To me the “found iPhone” saga is about as interesting as an afternoon of pontificating my navel. Yawn. It was dumb (legally) for GIZMODO to pay money for a lost/stolen device (although they definitely made back the $5k they paid for it). And Apple will [...]

Flowtown is a new service that will let you submit the email address of any person and be presented with a list of all the social networks that individual is a part of. It is just as they put it on the site: it will let you “turn an email address into a social profile”. [...]

The number of brands that are jumping on the Foursquare train is awesome. We’ve been talking about the no-brainer that is engaging with your customers and it’s very satisfying to see it happen with such strong companies and brands. Zagat Mashable reports: Zagat is calling the partnership “Foodie Love,” and there’s even a new accompanying [...]

Foursquare‘s first direct relationship of note was with the Brooklyn Museum. The museum saw the obvious value of visibility into who checked-in and decided to embrace the opportunity to directly provide it’s visitors with tips and tricks around the museum. The created an interactive experience and essentially a personally guided tour! Awesome. Other institutions saw [...]

Last week Mashable ran a poll to find out which location based service YOU like the most (I say YOU because I’ve learned that the folks that read this blog are likely the type to also peruse Mashable on a regular basis). I was very please to see the result here, obviously, and I’ve been [...]

The New York Times announced that they plan to start charging for the online content. This has been a VERY scary thing for the industry and a topic of much debate. As Fred Wilson said back in July, “the newspaper industry is doing a lot of soul searching for the right revenue model”. So why [...]

Most people know that Google’s precious search algorithm is a secret, sacred, thing that they’ve worked very hard to protect. In fact their behavior around that algorithm has been similar to Golum’s behavior towards his “precious” ring. You know, the one that will ‘rule them all’. This algorithm and others allow Google to provide very [...]

Here in Chicago we’ve been building a really solid group of users who are excited enough about Foursquare to tell their friends and the venues that they frequent. Last night we all met up at Lincoln Station in Lincoln Park and chatted about our experiences sharing foursquare and some of the challenges we’ve faced in [...]

Thursday night I had the pleasure of meeting Charles Adler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, the New York based group funding platform. Kickstarter serves as a way for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, and explorers (as they say on the site) to make their dreams come true, post a project, and collect the [...]

Last night I got an email from Amazon for being an AmazonAssociate. They wanted to bring my attention to the fact that they’ve (finally) integrated Twitter into their associates bar so that I could share products on Twitter. Yea, it’s pretty late to this game but it’s good to see a giant like Amazon admit [...]

This weekend @Mollstar and I had a long (relative to the amount of time I can usually get her to talk about the web) conversation about how we don’t really understand who plays all these Facebook games. Other than Poker from Zynga, which I play a decent amount of, I don’t understand who grows virtual [...]

For anyone who studies customer development you know that feedback is at the forefront of any successful product. In order to build a product or service that customers will actually want and hopefully pay for. If you’re not asking for customers to pay, you likely want their time and attention. I see this blog as [...]

Someone who I don’t talk about often on this blog but that I do have a lot of respect for is Mark Pincus. Mark is the CEO of the company that makes virtually games, specifically Farmville…yea you’ve probably played it. The game has 20 million active users as of last week. Mark is one of [...]