Monthly Archives: October 2008

We’re In A Death Spiral, But There Is Life Here

Posted on by
Reply

We all know that the economy is collapsing shouldn’t be any surprise to any person paying even the faintest bit of attention. Lately, there have been quite a few people instilling fearing with headlines, e.g.(NYT and Robert Scoble). I’m getting sick of all the fear mongering so I’m going to post some positive and inspirational links.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. ” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address is still one of the most inspirational speeches to have been given by a president. I beg you to listen to his words or read them as they bear wisdom that may help us turn this situation around. Just look at that jewel above and how the media channels are spouting fear to the masses.

A Responsible bank CEO speaks out about the bailout, the CEO of BB&T discusses 14 points that don’t make sense about the bailout. This may be tinged with a bit of fear but, atleast there are some banks that didn’t deal in the illogical financing, that got us into this mess. We need to find more banks with this kind of respectable handling of their customers’ money.

Today, the seeds of the next big thing are being planted, this is provision for inspiration. It is providing the knowledge of what has happened in the recent recessions and their outcomes. We all have the ability to build the next big thing, don’t quite your day job but, most definitely don’t stop trying to redefine the world of tomorrow.

Tyler Durden’s 8 Rules of Innovation, will help you if you decide that you want to redefine the future. “Your life is ending one minute at a time,” so you better go do what you want before your time runs out. This interpretation of  some of most notable quotes from the book and movie are remarkable.

I hope that they people have read this find this at least a small distraction from the turmoil around us. We need to have solidarity in our lives not instability. Surround yourself with people who can speak honestly about the current environment but still provide us with the strong front that we need.

Our Childrens Economy: Social Security

Posted on by
Reply

The United States is growing ever closer towards bankruptcy and we just keep piling on more and more debt. People don’t blame Bush it’s the law of compounding interest and providing too many services. One of the more pronounced services that is out there is Social Security. I find that it is quite possibly the largest disservice for the future of the country.

Social Security is the funds that are taken automatically from workers pay for retirement funding, unemployment,  disability, spousal and children, and widow benefits. All of these, except for the retirement, unemployment, and widow benefits, were not part of the original bill and the widow benefits have changed from lump-sum to the continued monthly payments of the deceased spouse. The original bill proposal was highly controversial in and was opposed because it would result in the loss of jobs. However, some said that this was an advantage as it encouraged the elderly to retire, opening positions for the youth.

The problem is that now the elderly are working longer and are less encouraged to leave, resulting in harder positioning for the younger generations. The fact that this pay comes from the workers who should be the younger generation means that this is impacting their future coverage. The average age of workers is also beginning to go up and at ~15% per worker and at a 5.8:1 worker/retired we are slowly sliding into a Social Security deficit; projections show that the ratio will drop to 3.1:1 meaning that we won’t even be providing half the coverage that’s promised.

While researching this, I discovered that the Social Security spending for the ’07 Fiscal Year was $580 billion, this is annualized process that increases every year. Honestly, we’re worried about the government spending $900 billion just once, sure it was on bad loans, but it’s actually going to help stabilize the country while we prepare for the long run. Social Security is ripping off the future generations to pay for it’s promises.

I propose that we introduce a retro-active grandfather clause that will reduce the rates of which people are accustomed will be receiving.  You reduce funding to anyone who was born since January 1, 1963(45 years old as of 1/1/09) to 70% of what they where promised once they reach 67, regressing the rate by 5% for every subsequent year until age 35. Anyone between the ages of 35 and 30 shall receive 25% and anyone below 30 will recieve nothing.  We have this bill continue until the year 2100 and direct excess funding towards the federal deficit. I would not have a problem having the tax remain in my wages so long as it is going to help sustain the state of the country in the future. This isn’t even as drastic as what we need but, it is an initial idea to help us get it started.

This is just my two cents on my subject, and in fact this would actually be excluding myself(19 years old). Though it wouldn’t matter there is nothing left for my generation or future generations, either way. Please leave some comments on what you think of this subject.

Following The Green

Posted on by
Reply

ComputerWorld posted an article that greatly disturbs me. In the article, it shows the growth of CS courses after a steady decline from the ’03-’04 school year to ’07 and how many are switching majors from business. It also mentions that students were making a similar swap back in the late 90’s towards tech.

Bryant said he expects that the troubles on Wall Street will likely influence some students to switch majors in the coming months from business to other fields, including computer science. He also urges caution to those students.

These students are obviously in it for the green, they followed it to business and now that it collapsed they’re following it to the next big thing. What we need are people passionate about what they do, not people that are only passionate about money, key examples abound in the Financial Sector right now. I think we should find people who actually want to do these jobs, and not just for the money.

With the economy as weak as it is, if your a small company it’s going to be even more important for you to find passionate people, just read Jason Calacanis’ latest post (recommend signing up to his mailing list), excerpt below.

3. Firing the average people: Again, it’s totally politically
incorrect, but I highly recommend firing anyone who is good or
average. Startups are an Olympic sport and every slot on your team is
critical. You wouldn’t put a “good” swimmer in a relay, would you?
Don’t have one in your startup. Fire the good and replace them with
the great. ~ Jason Calacanis

You know who are probably not going to be average, the people who are passionate about what they are doing. The passionate employee may spend more of their personal time on learning more about they’re area, and be willing to take a pay cut to keep they’re position.

So we need to find a way to deter people from following the money, in the next few years we will see a large rise in un-passionate employees in the Tech Industry. This will hurt companies that invest in people that only got into the area for the cash. What happens when the cashflow slows, or another bubble happens, and how can we stop them now?

Start Me Up: Interview With Calley Nye About Dashbuzz

Posted on by
2

With the economy the way it is and VC’s tightening the reigns on the funding they are giving out, a startup is hard to do right now, especially without a prototype. Recently, I came across Calley Nye(SiliconCalley) through a tweet from social media genius Gary Vaynerchuk, and they spoke about a stealth site that she was quite tight lipped about.

Yesterday, was the day that she finally shared some information about this site it will be called Dashbuzz. However, she currently doesn’t have a prototype to present to venture firms, so she is seeking to raise twenty-five thousand in grassroots funding through a program she’s calling Start Me Up. I decided to interview her to see if I could get more details that what she had given on her post. She gladly provided answers and I would like to see this service get funded as it looks like an amazing marketing tool.
I have provided the interview below.

I understand that your site is still in pre-alpha stages correct?

Yes, Dashbuzz is currently in very early stages(pre-alpha), but we are moving along quickly and hope to come out with a beta in early 2009.

Is Dashbuzz a marketing tool, and who do you plan on the service targeting, professional marketers or the general public?

The roots of the idea lies in marketing, but not traditional marketing. My marketing experience is in social media marketing and using grassroot techniques. Rather than coming out with a tool that is solely for marketing companies and professional marketers, I’ve decided to provide the general public with the tools that they need for marketing, in hopes that it opens the social media marketing industry to everyone.

It will be a freemium service so there will be different levels; they will range from average social media usage(1-5 services) to extreme social media usage(5+ services). I feel like the site everyone has the right to understand how to get their content out there, whether it be a blog, art, music, films, or their business. We will eventually offer and enterprise size application that will take advantage of the usage statistics from the other users.

What value do you see this service providing to this group?

It will offer a new way to look at how we use social media. Currently, we are using all these services, but we don’t know what kind of activity sparks what kind of traffic and sales. Maybe when you post at 3 o’clock in the afternoon on Facebook, you get more page views than you do at 10:30 o’clock in the morning. Have you ever had a spike and didn’t know where it came from? These are all things that we are attempting to figure out, and I think the knowledge of such events will offer great value to our users.

What other ventures have you been involved with and how successful were they?

This is my first company that offers a real product. I had a social media marketing company for several years, but that was a service, so it wasn’t scalable at all. I made good money for awhile, but couldn’t build it up too much. I decided I wanted to start building things, instead of building things up for other people. So, I started my blog SiliconCalley to learn more about startups. After a brief stint writing for TechCrunch, I started an LA based tech news blog called TechNews.LA. It hasn’t been around that long, but it’s doing very well.

What will the people investing in your service this early be receiving for their assistance?

They will be enrolled on the beta tester list to be the first people to use the service. They will also receive discounts on the site when we open up the premium memberships. Bloggers who invest will then be the first people to write about the service. Service providers and advertisers( and potential partners) who invest will also be considered first when the time comes the top 100 investors will receive free lifetime memberships.

If anyone is interested in providing funding to help start this company please visit her site here, where you can read what she’s written about this, donate to the cause, or contact her for further information.

Issues That Windows And The Government Share

Posted on by
Reply

While jotting down some notes for another post; I wrote 3 issues that the government and Windows share. This lead to me coming up with more and more so I decide I’d give you a list of what I came up with. I would love it if you shared any that you can think of.

  1. When your in the direst of need for there services an error occurs in which everything must be restarted.
  2. They are bloated trying to provide everything to everyone.
  3. They have services you didn’t know about consuming precious resources.
  4. They come with programs that are never used.
  5. The user interface can be horrible, it always looks great but doesn’t always respond.
  6. If you’ve got the money you can get a better experience.
  7. Pretty much everyone knows about these issues but the majority don’t mind and continue to use it.

Come on people share any that you can come up with.