THE DREAM IN ACTION

In a recent project, I’ve been trying to sign-up venues here in Chicago to be on Foursquare. It’s been a fun experiment in sales and a wake up call to the difficulties of door to door sales pitches. Below I’d like to share some of the findings of the experiment and some of the suggestions [...]

Some people don’t understand how young technology companies work. Some people make it sound like you should be able to charge right away and bootstrap every startup. Well sometimes, in the social web world, you need to have adoption of your product before it proves it’s value. It’s difficult to prove value without adoption and [...]

There is a new trend on the web and both startups and investors are taking note. Fred Wilson has called this trend, “taking the web offline”. Others call it the challenge of “local”. Companies like Loopt and Foursquare are taking this problem head on. As the only web nerd amongst my group of friends I [...]

Kanye Interupts Taylor Swift You may be aware that a few nights ago Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift in her VMA victory speech to claim that Beyonce’s video should have one instead. It was one of the most obnoxious acts by a celebrity in recent memory and really seemed to show his true colors. I [...]

I recently hoped to find an iPhone app so that I could pull up TV schedules really easily. I search the Apple app store for “tv schedules” and found 3 options (screen shot below), of which had reviews but they really weren’t enough to find out which app was actually the best. I needed more [...]

I’ve been listening to a lot more music than normal since I’ve been working from home for the past few weeks. I’ve really enjoyed diving into the lesser known songs on some of my favorite albums. I decided to see how some of my new found favorites racked and stacked against one another, luckily, there [...]

Late last year I started thinking a bit about gen-Y and what my generation means to the workforce. I wondered how we would affect the way businesses hire, how they’d treat employees, what opportunities companies would create for us, and how we would create opportunities for ourselves even when companies wouldn’t (or couldn’t). Those thoughts [...]

Last night I was at Lollapalooza (#lolla). The day was phenomenal including shows from Airborn Toxic Event, The Hood Internet, Passion Pit, Snoop Dogg, & Band of Horses. I took a bunch more pics and posted them to my flickr. One thing that really stuck out to me all day was the fact that when [...]

This is a longer post so I’ve decided to included a read time estimate so you can plan accordingly. Enjoy! Reading time: 10 – 16 minutes; Reading time bold: 3 – 4 minutes While reading ‘Predictably Irrational‘, a phenomenal book by Dan Ariely, the well known TED speaker, I began thinking about his discussion of [...]

This post is very different from any I’ve ever written here on TDIA. I should first say that I am by no means any kind of authority on new or trending music. I don’t claim to be someone who is good at finding music before most others. For that check out @melillo and Say.No.Radio. It’s [...]

A few months back I was engaged in a conversation about how social media (blogs, twitter, facebook, etc.) can really be used to drive tangible changes for a business. As individuals we are able to connect with old friends, stay even more connected with co-workers, and track real time topics, but what do businesses really [...]

via flickr While reading ‘Predictably Irrational‘, a phenomenal book by Dan Ariely, well known TED speaker, I began thinking about his discussion of Social Norms and Market Norms. I’ve re-termed them for the sake of this post to be a bit more descriptive as Social and Market Behavior Codes. I’ll first start with my own [...]

via mario.nolla I’m now working on startup numero 3. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the process but I’ve not really enjoyed the process, yet. As in, I’ve not made it. I’ve yet to create anything that was sell-able, sustainable, or strong enough to go full time on. So, I decided to make a list for myself of [...]

I was checking out the new site 100twt.com that follows the top 100 most followed Twitterers when I came across this tweet from Diddy. This is a call out from Diddy asking his followers for inspirational quotes. Below are his next week of Tweets. See any RT’s? No retweets (RT’s) at all. At first I [...]

Everyone dreams about what they would ‘ideally’ do with their lives. Everyone has ideas of how they could improve their life in order to live their dreams. Don’t you want more meaningful relationships, more social influence, and a thicker wallet? You and I will both will always be interested in how we can improve our [...]