Category Archives: Business

The World We Take For Granted

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Going to give you a choice, if you don’t care about the little details about my world all you have to do is read the first paragraph and the last paragraph. I’ve made it easy and quick for you.

How often do you take note of the world around you and its details of what it has offered the world? I come from Lewisburg, a small town of less than 8000 people, in West Virginia, that has been the center of so much I was shaken by the fact. Mind you I’ve lived here nearly 20 years and knew most of these things but, never really gave a damn. Then everything just starts to fall in and you realize that it isn’t as small as you once thought.

It’s amazing how people can change a town’s history. This kind of kicked off last week when I heard someone at work mention Seth McClung, the Brewers relief-pitcher. Today, Patch Adams, the one the movie was based on, came through our airport on his way to his property a few miles down the road. There was also Bimbo Coles, retired basketball player for several NBA teams and on the 1988 Olympic team. Mason Patrick, a major general, highest rank military officials had received during his time period(1918-1927) received his brigadier general and major general status within a one month period.

The town and surrounding area also have quite the history. The area was a very intensely disputed area during the Civil War with a cavern that was used as a salt-peter mine and multiple battle grounds within the area. Just on the edge of the town is a cemetery with unmarked Confederate soldiers. We have the one of the only continuously used Carnegie Halls in the world and it is also booked with world renowned acts though at a less frequent pace than the one located in New York, for obvious reasons. The Greenbrier Resort, the famous government bunker and the host of the first Ryder Cup, lies just a few miles away.

Almost all the people who have lived here all their life know about these things, though some are hidden just off the beaten path, even for regulars. Those that have moved here probably know of the big ones like Carnegie Hall and the Greenbrier. Look around your town, city, or even neighborhood, you never know what you might find out about your community and it’s history.

Honestly, this post wasn’t about what we have it’s about not caring enough to realize what you have. The little things in life are what truly matter, even if you don’t notice them. Little things may be something huge and astounding to someone who doesn’t experience them every day.

Some Inspiration From The Web

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A man’s wealth comes not from what he carries in his wallet but, what he carries in his heart.

So we’ve all dealt with and continue to deal with the volatile markets of this past week and likely to come back next week though more subdued. Most of us are still probably a bit worried about what’s going to happen in the coming months. I don’t think we should focus on that it’s just not good for general mental health, though we should all be knowledgeable about what is going on around us. I feel like providing some positive inspiration and news for such a down time.

How to Overcome the Fear of Failure – Success Soul This isn’t just about personal failure though it focuses on solidifying oneself. This is something for everyone, we all have our personal pillars that we rely on so that we can keep standing even when we are weak. If our pillars are weak they won’t be able to support us when we fall so we all need to fight the fear and buckle down for the coming months.

What Does it Mean to Be Rich? – Get Rich Slowly A good analysis of what rich is and what it may be. He describes a really interesting situation that he went through recently that makes you think. Even if you feel poor, infact, you may be richer in comparison to the majority of the world?

The Best $20 You’ll Ever Spend – Get Rich Slowly This post is directed more towards people who want to build their knowledge through networking. This is great for people seeking to become independent of the workforce, start a business, or just become a better leader. This is honestly the simplest way’s to enrich you mind of working strategies and new ideas, it’s also inexpensive.

Is All This Paranoia About a Startup Depression Justified? – The Next Web This is an honest explanation of the positive aspects of the collapsing Web 2.0 arena. If your interested in where the boom tech sectors(e.g. Web 2.0, Clean Tech, etc.) are likely to go, this is a great example of what is going to happen during the coming months.

Lastly the story of a sheriff in Cook County, Ohio that is standing up against banks to help people stay in their homes. He’s refusing to do instant foreclosures and giving the families 120 days of leniency.

Building Upon Trust

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Trust is the ultimate key for marketing anything. The more people who trust in what you know and say, the more willing they are to spread the word. Trust is the key to “Word of Mouth” which  is an extremely viral aspect in marketing. The more people that trust you means that even more people will come to trust you through relations and be passionate with what you do and say.

It is not what you know but, who you know that will get your through life.

Several, example businesses both for good and bad.

Google – This is one of the most famous examples of a trust based company. It has had a notoriously low marketing budget, with no real world advertising. They have built their business through users trust in the search results and spread into other trust-worthy services.

Digg – This company took off because of fans of Kevin Rose trusted in the service he was providing. It was his own ability to build trust in the tech community to provide the user base for his service.

eBay – This is a recent failure, it built itself up into a trustworthy business after years of being around. Recently, it has lost people due to it’s inability to adapt to the I want it now mentality, as an auction site.

Any Social Network – These sites just don’t work without other users, so you have to either market it heavily or hope that the early adopters love it enough to spread it around.

Familiarity is another key to gaining trust that allows your to become connected. Familiarity provides an easy way to provide a setting that people will be able to easily connect with. You can provide them with tools they already know how to use or, be focused in the same areas as they are, allowing them easy entry into the subject.

These are the way to spread an idea, product, or service. You provide them what they want or something they don’t know they need. Let your early adopters spread the idea to their friends, this is the reason what you do needs to be remarkable and memorable. Don’t knock off developed products you will not steal it’s users by doing that and it will hurt you in the long run, because there will be no trust in your abilities.

Following The Green

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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

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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.

Back Your Shit Up

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That’s something a friend told me several months ago. It means doing what you want and stop dicking around, procrastinating ,and lying about who you are or what you’re doing. This hit me hard yesterday, chatting with some people on Ustream, a guy pointed out that you can’t call it a start-up if you haven’t started, yet, it’s just a project. The reason this hit me so hard is because I had heard it here 

from Gary Vaynerchuk when he spoke about the crowd that tries to flip their businesses without monetizing during your way to the top, “Make some cash along the way.”

If you want to get anywhere in this new social society, where transparency is so necessary, you are going to have to back your shit up. If you say something you better make sure you have the details right or your going to have your ass handed to you. You have to be able to provide your crowd of followers what they want and if you say your going to do something, you better <omitted> do it. I am going to keep doing this for myself but, I will continue to post it for my crowd.

DWYSYWD, saw those letters on a license plate in North Carolina, several years ago. I thought about what those letters meant for probably half an hour and finally came up with something that fit, ” Do what you said you would do.” Doing what you said you would do is the key to backing your shit up and, it will simplify your life. When you follow through and stop lying you remove the need to continue lying and you become transparent and open to these people. This is key to building your brand.

“Stop dicking around and back your shit up. Do what you said you would do.”

Being Fluid In Your Motions

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The world is changing so quickly that if your not readily adaptable to this change; you will have trouble keeping up with people who are ready. One of the best things that you can do is be fluid in your motions. Be able to adapt to what’s coming, view yourself as the water that sits behind a dam. If you want to get past that wall you can’t be a stone or you’ll never get past it. Thus, we must all be fluid and able to seep through the cracks, overflow the boundaries, or breakthrough with so much force we obliterate the wall.

Seeping Through is going to be slower than the other two ways to get through the path, but it will be more reserved and rational. This is a reasonable choice if you fear an abrupt change that would destroy the majority of progress that you made. You can still manage to get past the  wall, though you may be surpassed by others in the Overflow or Breakthrough categories.

Overflowing the Boundaries will be the most level of these ideas as it has an adequate pace and will fill the other side of the dam quite rapidly. This is for those who don’t mind risking a bit of their assets if something were to happen. You can outpace those that are just trying to Seep Through to gain ground and, also have a more consistent pace than that of someone who is trying to Breakthrough. This is the way to go if you want to be able to more reliably adapt and still move quickly.

Breakthrough is going to be the quickest once it happens, but the pace will be hard to maintain, without prior planning. You can destroy the barrier and quickly decimate your competition in the short-term, however, if you didn’t plan properly a change can ruin you just as quickly. If you pass the first dam and hit another down the line, you may not have enough pressure to cause it to buckle. Breaking through will not be for everyone, except for a few people who have it together, most people should try to just Overflow the boundaries or slowly Seep through.

If you were a stone you will sit at the bottom for ever and never find a path through to the otherside of  the dam. You may never know what lie on the other side and be just as happy and complacent for ever, slowly being wittled down by those that flowed past you. You do not want to be a stone do you? Most of all, be yourself and find a way to adapt to the change, pass  through the barriers and achieve your goals.