Dot Product

If you read this blog, you have to endure my quirky humor. I found this very amusing. Light Bulbs don’t emit light, they suck dark!

That’s Apple’s Mantra for their World Wide Developers Conference, currently under way in San Francisco. Check out the RSS Support in Safari under “Tiger”. Very cool indeed! Their Spotlight feature looks really cool as well, taking local search beyond files to application content (e-mail, address book, etc) as well. Too bad we have to wait until “early 2005″.

I took this picture back in the beginning of May when I was visiting Madison to take care of some business:

(Click to download BIG version)

Badger Liquor always has an entertaining sign in the window, but this one struck a chord because it’s the same chorus sung by many ONLINE content providers: please buy our stuff because we entertain you. It’s one of many models for monetizing web traffic, and I think it would be interesting to see a case study that looks at the different methods and what is effective (and what isn’t). Hmmm, I smell a project brewing…

This site rocks! Metacritic.com pulls from dozens of review sources, weights the results and determines an overall score for movies, DVDs, music and games. The individual rating pages contain snippets from the reviews themselves, along with the individual score for each review. It gave LoTR:RotK a 92 (out of 100), and Garfield a 26, so at least the extrema are covered nicely.

Some quick links that I’ve found interesting:

– Wondering where to get ideas? Well this site promises an idea a day. Sure, this isn’t a high quality stream of ideas that will make you rich, but it still stimulates the brain. I can also suggest Halfbakery.com, a site that has all sorts of half-baked ideas. Enjoy!

– Got kids? Well, you might enjoy building some paper models with them. I had quite a few Star Wars paper models as a kid. Fun to build, but they didn’t last long. :>

– Once again, VentureBlog has delivered the goods. This time it’s a bit of a ramble, but ends up on the topic of awareness. The point in a nutshell: one impact on the success of a startup (or any venture really) is the degree of awareness that the leadership has, especially with regard to the market and competition.

– Fer petes sake, spread the word: STOP USING INTERNET EXPLORER or you will be 0wn3d! Plenty of great browsers out there that match or exceed MSIE capabilities. My favorite is Safari, but you have to run Mac OS X to feel the love. A strong second place is Firefox.

I’m reading “How Would You Move Mount Fuji?” right now, and it’s a really enjoyable book, both from the perspective of the puzzles, and the story behind how puzzle-based interviewing has emerged in businesses and startups. The idea is that traditional interview questions simply don’t work if you’re looking to find intelligent problem-solvers rather than drones. Puzzles can force the interviewee to think outside the box, and demonstrate their creative and problem-solving thought process (so the theory goes).

I can say that my experiences in hiring have led me to believe that the traditional approach to interviews is flawed, since the quality of the interview was rarely a predictor of the candidate’s abilities. I have not had the opportunity to try puzzle-based interviews, but I think they will definitely considered for future hiring decisions.

If you like puzzles as much as I do, you might also enjoy Wu’s Riddles.

One of my pet peeves is people who take more than their allocated time to talk. If you’ve been given 10 minutes to talk, and 5 minutes for Q&A, don’t take more than 10 minutes to get your point across. Going substantially over time is rude and inconsiderate of the audience and the host. I wish more people got this message.

Part of the problem might be that presenters have trouble isolating the points that they absolutely have to get across. Nowhere is this problem more prevalent than in business plan presentations. Feld Thoughts has some suggestions for the content of powerpoint slides to be used in a business plan presentation.

Deloitte & Touche gave a presentation several months ago at Rensselaer on “Building and Delivering the Presentation”. It had 12 slides that overlap pretty well with Feld’s observations. I think the 3 extra slides that he lists (Partnerships, Fit and Other) were not in the Deloitte presentation are worth considering if they’re applicable. As usual, it’s good input, but everyone needs to tailor it to their needs. I think anything that de-emphasizes the technical aspects of the pitch and focuses on how you’re going to make money is a good step in the right direction.

Why do some companies get funding while others lie fallow? Why do VCs seem to have a herd mentality, and types of ventures suddenly receive funding from various source? How is Silicon Valley like Hollywood? VentureBlog has the first installment in a series that tries to answer some of these questions. I don’t take the post as absolute law, but it is definitely insightful. Worthy Read.

Anybody else out there getting e-mails from spammers with subjects like “Stop Spam Now”, but usually with a few extra ‘a’s or ‘o’s thrown in for good measure? Who on earth is going to trust the fox to protect the hen-house?!?

If you want to get one hojillion offers for a free merchant account, or other associated services, all you really need to do is file some articles of incorporation, and then watch the offers roll in! Actually, it’s a sound business practice on the part of the companies sending the mail. After all, some fraction of the corporations out there are going to need some kind of payment processing aparatus, such as a merchant account, so bulk mail solicitations might be an effective way of growing the customer base.

So far, the mail has been dominated by merchant account processors, and cell phone providers, but I can think of many other services that a new business would need that might fit this promotion model. I’m sure you can too!