THE DREAM IN ACTION

Blake and I with ActionsTalk had the extreme honor of being a part of small group of people that were featured in the October issue of Magazine SOHO. The article was called Milwaukee 2.0 – Socially Networked and Authentic Professionals

Magazine SOHO is a print version of SOHObiztube.com, a online networking site that focuses on one of the hottest mediums on the web, video. As businesses are looking to connect online, SOHObiztube.com is an incredibly valuable platform for business networking on growth.

I’d just like to thank Cd Vann the founder of Magazine SOHO and the other SNAPs for being so gracious to ActionsTalk as we’ve grown our show and our viewership. We hope that ActionsTalk will continue to contribute to the growth of Milwaukee’s web startup community, and we hope you’ll help us. Enjoy the mag!

I recently read Purple Cow by Seth Godin. Seth is a professional speaker, a writer and an agent of change! It has been said that “Seth Godin may be the best intuitive marketer alive today”.

I’ve read marketing books before and this one is different! The idea of the purple is this…

When you drive by a boring road in the mid-west (and they all are, I speak from experience) you see cows a plenty. You don’t notice them at all, one cow after another and it literally has no affect on you whatsoever. But, if one day you were driving down the same boring mid-west road and you saw a purple cow you would FREAK OUT. You wouldn’t know what to do and you’d probably stop to look at it. But if later that day you continued to drive down the road and every cow was purple you wouldn’t stop anymore. You’d probably still be stunned that you saw purple cows but how long do you think that would last? Eventually you wouldn’t even care that there were purple cows at all.  You’d continue down the boring mid-west road just as you had when the cows were black and white.

At first as Godin explains, a purple cow is something remarkable. It commands demands attention. But, eventually even the remarkable becomes the ordinary and something else ‘remarkabler‘ takes its place.  Godin teaches in Purple Cow how to continually create remarkable products! This book and Godin’s thoughts on the subjects of R&D vs. Marketing and how they are inter-related are invaluable. This book is a must read for any start-up, marketer, or product developer.

Godin’s sums it up best (as the author should) “Marketing is way to important for the marketing department”.

Ever wonder what your friend at Microsoft, Yahoo!, Cisco, etc. are making? Is it more than you? Maybe. Well Glassdoor.com gives you a clear view of what that number may be. The gist of the site is, “tell me your salary and I’ll tell you mine”, and it works. The site has ratings & reviews of jobs, companies, and leaders of different businesses. The interface is clean and simple and seems to really give you a “insider” view of the the company. The salary number will only become more accurate as more people join, however, the site does rely on the honesty of its users. Because of the anonimity of the information posting it is possible that a person could mislead the numbers.

Here’s how it works:

Last night I had a conversation with Larry Chiang regarding ‘The Art of the Business Plan’ chapter in Guy Kawasaki’s “The Art of the Start“. We got to thinking about how plans are useless but planning is indispensable! I jumped over to re-read one of Larry’s posts on GigaOm and found this little tid bit to be a gem. Thanks Larry!

Everyone has a plan until you get hit. A boxing legend friend of mine told me this once (see item #9). It’s good advice for entrepreneurs also, because we all know that defensiveness is kryptonite to entrepreneurship — and obviously to interviewers, too. After you get your nose bloodied, can you “retrack” and reestablish the goal? Can you get back to fundamentals? Founders have to.

This is from Larry Chiang’s post about Sarah Lacy’s failed attempt at interviewing Zuckerberg at SXSW this year. The post was a cheeky commentary called ‘8 Things Sarah Lacy Could Learn From Founders She Covers’. Kind of a tough blow, but watch the interview, so

Over the past 3 months I have traveled tons! Lets just put it this way, since I moved to Milwaukee in late December 07 I’ve put 10k miles on my Pathfinder. Crazy! Plus a flight to Kansas City and a flight to Charlotte. So I began tracking my trips using the awesome travel social network Dopplr. Recently Dopplr rolled out something called “Track your carbon” that basically tells people what the carbon footprint of their travel is. They teamed up with AMEE to track and measure this footprint. This is my carbon footprint for May, June, and July…check out Dopplr, whats your carbon footprint?

Also, you can track my travel using the widget in the sidebar.

Yesterday Gary and Kevin were together in Vegas and took an hour or so just to answer questions people had on Seesmic. A few notes on this:

• Seesmic is obviously sweet and is going to last. The big names are buying in.
• Kevin and Gary combined have phenomenal insights into building web companies and communities.
• I’m pissed I caught this late and didn’t ask a question.

I watched most of the question and answers and chose to post this one because of its relevance to start-ups. However, many questions were totally random and I loved that. One question was about how to sneak out of the house!? This question is about how to bring more people to a company as it relates to employees and as it relates to funding. Here is Kevin and Gary’s answer.

These guys are awesome. Look soon for my review of Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book: 101 Wines Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World.

“I pitch therefore I am.” This week I read the chapter out of The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki called “The Art of Pitching” (CH3). The chapter is about how an entrepreneur seeking funding from VC’s can optimize his pitch to be most successful. Also, this week I had the first meeting for ActionsTalk and I found the chapter I read significantly helped my pitch to the group at that meeting. Due to the fact that it was the first kick-off meeting I had an opportunity to pitch the vision and the known plan for ActionsTalk to about 7 people who had no idea what we had in mind. No, none of the people at the meeting are potential investors in ActionsTalk (at this time) but it was great practice to throw the idea out there, work through the wrinkles, and receive constructive feedback.

Although I’m at least months out from being in a position to pitch a product idea to potential investors I found the chapter to be very applicable. Guy makes a point in the chapter about how VC’s (the audience) isn’t here for an autobiographical monologue, rather they are there to hear your idea/s. So, he advises that you immediately dive into your idea versus introducing yourself excessively and going into your background. I did this consciously at the ActionsTalk meeting and it worked wonders. The group was captured by the vision for ActionsTalk and moved towards finding out how they could be involved. After the attention of the meeting was placed on the vision of ActionsTalk it was simple to introduce myself and introduce how I will help the ActionsTalk conference become a reality. My story did not take away from, bore, or force the group to wait, rather, it was a building block in the plan of ActionsTalk.

Much of this chapter discusses the best ways to use a presentation in a meeting and Guy lays out ground rules for a Powerpoint presentation. I did not need to use a actual powerpoint pitch in this scenario but will definitely need to in the future and I will surely use this chapter as a reference at that time.

Lastly, one of the best take-aways from the chapter is the idea that you need to pitch constantly. It is stressed that always talking about your idea will do nothing but help you refine the idea, refine the pitch, and increase the likely hood that you are able to communicate your mission clearly and convince someone to give you money, resources, or support. Just another crucial lesson in learning the art of starting a start-up.

This is definitely my favorite advice to getting a business started. It is the most difficult thing to do but it is definitely the most action inspiring and results driven advice I’ve heard.

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

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

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?

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

When MTV started airing ‘Elimidate’ (and other equally worthless shows) and permanently abandoned their roots, music, many were very upset. When Fall Out Boy became “Sell Out Boy” and abandoned their indie roots, many others were very upset.

Pitchfork.tv provides and awesome combination of what MTV and Fall Out Boy stole from us, great indie music with great indie videos. Not only does pitchfork.tv hook up some great videos they are on the ball with offering some mp3’s and blogs along with the usual fodder of photos, reviews and interviews.

In the words of the founders: “Pitchfork.tv is the first-ever music video channel dedicated to the documentation of independent music. As a visual extension of the music coverage Pitchfork Media has provided for more than a decade, and a means of updating and advancing the music television format, Pitchfork.tv brings you closer to the artists you love, through original mini-documentaries, secret rooftop and basement sessions, full concerts, exclusive interviews, and the most carefully curated selection of music videos online.”

My take: Site well built. The UI is phenomenally creative where the video playing never leave center stage but you can still read your reviews and get the concert schedules. As a say.no.radio faithful this is a welcomed combo to my favorites.