July 4, 2008
Best Independence Day Speech Ever
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July 4, 2008 in My 50 Favorite Movies
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July 4, 2008
Cooking on the web with Debi Mazar & Gabriele Corcos
Queens girl Debi Mazar is one of my favorite actresses. I just flipped on the TV while I was eating breakfast and caught some Jackie Chan movie she was in and got sort of curious about what she was up to. Wikipedia pointed me to Under the Tuscan Gun, which is the video blog about cooking her and her husband have.
It's pretty cool to see someone you've only seen in movies in their home, unscripted, just being themselves with their loved one. What I really liked was that, in their recent episode, they had to start at close to midnight after they put the kids to bed. Still, they got all dressed up and had a little cooking date at home. How cute are these two? Now if only Gabriele learned the difference between a peach and a nectarine...
This makes me think of the random Christopher Walken cooking at home video. Are there any other celebrity cooking blogs out there?
The web: Where regular people can be celebrities and celebrities are regular people.
Who else would you like to see at home making a meal?
Here's my top five:
- Barack & Michelle Obama
- Robert DeNiro
- David Byrne
- Marilyn Manson
- Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale
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July 4, 2008 in Random Stuff
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July 3, 2008
Bond Trailer for Quantum of Solace
Sah-weet!
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July 3, 2008 in My 50 Favorite Movies
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July 3, 2008
My del.icio.us links
Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:
I tagged it with: art, brooklyn, glass, glassblowing
I tagged it with: books
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July 3, 2008
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July 1, 2008
My recent tracks on Last.fm
The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:
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July 1, 2008
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June 30, 2008
My recent tracks on Last.fm
The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:
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June 30, 2008
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June 30, 2008
My recent tracks on Last.fm
The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:
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June 30, 2008
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June 30, 2008
Friendfeed replacing Twitter? Yeah, and sometimes when I want an apple, I eat fish instead.
"Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm for Friendfeed has to do with my goal to reduce the amount of digital noise..."
Mark Evans nails exactly how I feel about FriendFeed in his post: "The Digerati’s Love Affair With Friendfeed".
He points out how Haterington says people are just moving from Twitter to Friendfeed, because of Twitter's scaling issues.
For the 99% of us on Twitter who don't follow 8,000 people, that makes no sense at all. I get a big chunk of my tweets on my phone, because I like knowing, in short, real time snippets, what my actual friends are up to. That's what I think of Twitter as. Do I need to know, on my phone, in real time, when they all post photos, blog posts, favorite music, comment on other people's blogs, etc... Yeah, not so much.
To me, they're two totally different apps...not even close. Friendfeed is basically an RSS reader for the social actions of a critical mass of people--all of their social actions. It's built to be a firehose--a completely out of context firehose of all sorts of different content. Twitter, on the other hand, is built off of short messages in real time. How this is supposed to be a replacement for Twitter I have no idea.
How exactly does FriendFeed help me meet up with people at the Shake Shack...like now?
I think some of the digerati need to understand that they don't use these applications like most of the rest of us who are using them do, and that even just being in the groups that do mean we're a small segment of the population.
Call me old fashioned, but there's a group I want to see Flickr photos from, a group I want to share music with, some people I want to see the tweets of, and so on... and these groups hardly overlap at all. Not only that, I want a relevant set of features in each context..."loving" certain songs, sending certain blog posts to del.icio.us and labeling certain photos with funny notes.
FriendFeed seems to cater to the same kind of crowd that treats content consumption and audience creation like some kind of contest that involves belt unbuckling and rulers.
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June 30, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology
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June 30, 2008
Buried in your own startup? Who's going to get buried in yours?
When's the last time you offered help to another startup? Even if it's just sitting down and listening to someone's pitch for them, or giving product advice, spending a few minutes with someone else's big idea can reap tons of benefits, and not just for them.
First off all, being selfless generates goodwill. Any time you spend on someone else's project will be more than reciprocated when you need something in return. So when you're looking for people to invite their friends and spread the word about your app, don't be surprised when your strongest supporters are the guys you went to lunch with last week to be an elevator pitch sounding board. I think too many people bury themselves in their own work, and then when it comes down to needing a supportive community to grow their service, they find a lot of tumbleweed blowing through their social graph. Don't expect to disappear on your friends and fellow entrepreneurs for months on and and then expect the cavalry to arrive when you need a Digg.
Secondly, pulling your head out of the sand once in a while can inspire you. I make it a point to spend time with entrepreneurs who work in other verticals, because you never know when an idea that works somewhere else can be reapplied in a novel way. I don't spend all of my time in the job space because it contains a lot of the kind of stagnant thinking I want to disrupt with Path 101. Some of my best ideas have come from startups and just other professionals in completely different industries.
A lot of people cling to startups who seem to be on the rise, but fail to be there for others when things aren't going so well. Helping someone who is down and out in a difficult time is not only severely needed, because the ups and downs of the startup world can be difficult, but can also put you in the right place at the right time when companies start scuttling themselves. You might be able to take over a cheap lease, hire your superstar coding buddy who tried to go out on his own but it didn't work, or grab an unwanted server (or two).
Community participation is also important. By sharing your successes and failures with others, not only can that raise your own profile, but contributing to a strong local tech community can have longer term benefits. Maybe it will be easier to hire your next developer down the line because more people will know what you're up to, or the community will just attract more people. I never thought of any of this stuff when I started nextNY, but I can clearly see a positive ROI to my participation. If it wasn't for nextNY, I never would have found my partner Alex, because I caught up with him at a couple of community events right after he left his last job.
I don't know if this makes me sound insincere or not--I'm just trying to point out to those who wouldn't normally take their eyes off their own work that there can be a positive ROI to being a bit selfless. Not everyone is naturally this way, and so sometimes people need to see incentives, which, to me, is fine as long as the help is authentic.
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June 30, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology
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June 29, 2008
My recent tracks on Last.fm
The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:
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June 29, 2008
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June 29, 2008
I call ceo.nyc I want this domain when .nyc becomes available.
Right now, I'm ceonyc all over the web. I've so swamped these six letters all over the web, that even the domain name (which I don't have... it belongs to a strop club) doesn't come up in the first few pages of Google. When's the last time you saw that?
So when I saw that ICANN is opening up other types of domain suffixes, it's pretty obvious that, at some point, there will be a .nyc, in which case, I'm calling rights to ceo.nyc right now. So there!
Can I trademark it?
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June 29, 2008 in Random Stuff
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June 29, 2008
Free Business Plan: Coffee Shop WiFi Social Network
In your local coffee shop, there are probably tons of interesting people around you--all using the free (or not so free) wifi.
Some of those people may be consultants for hire. Other people might be doing really cool startups. The guy next to you may be your best friend's new roommate. The girl across from you might be your soul mate.
How would you know?
How about an opt-in social network that you login to when you get sent to those Terms of Service pages for logging in to the free wifi. You could agree to show your profile--which could be a new profile or maybe just an aggregation of your Facebook, LinkedIn, etc profiles anytime you login to that wifi node.
Personally, I'd love to know who's around me when I'm sitting down at a coffee show and I'd be more than happy to display what I'm up to as well. Plus, I like the idea of making the coffee shop experience offline a lot more social, because you could start a conversation with someone in person based on mutual interests.
The data about where I tend to login to free wifi could also be used in a MyBlogLog kind of way... where if I login three times, I automatically get added to that shop's community. At that point, it would benefit the shop to provide free wifi and encourage participation on the network, because seeing where interesting people or your friends go to hangout would encourage you to show up as well.
Of course, this means you have to have feet on the ground to get into the firmware/software setup of all these routers in all these random coffee shops. There's no easy way to get viral adoption here. It's curious to me why Starbucks never setup the "Your Starbucks" social network, because people have such strong affinities to the one that they go to and often see the same people all the time.
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June 29, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology
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June 25, 2008
My recent tracks on Last.fm
The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:
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June 25, 2008
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June 25, 2008
USA 2030
22 years from now, I will be 50. There's a scary thought.
Anyway, I'll probably have teenage kids and, aside from that, I have no idea what my world will look like, mostly because I have no specific long term plans.
At least me and our government have that in common.
It seems all our government plans all run along election timelines--except for McCain, of course, who's got visionary plans to occupy Iraq for 100 years.
I think we should be thoughtful about some period in between that. Mike Bloomberg unveiled a plan for this city to cover what it would look like in 2030. It seemed like as good a an arbitrary point in the future as any. The plan was just about sustainability, but it touched on many areas of life and our economy.
I'd like to see the US unveil a similar plan for our whole country--across all of the facets of our life: the environment, energy, education, business, culture and the arts, infrastructure. Let's kick it off with a big Davos-like conference of the leaders of today and tomorrow, as well as the people who clearly aren't on leadership paths. Mix in some soccer moms and trailer park kids and maybe even an ex convict or two (given the disproportionate number of our population in jail).
Let's set some stretch goals like, "In 2030, we will have the best and most accessible education on the planet."
Why not?
If we can't make that happen after 22 years of focusing on it, then at least we'll be trying. How about 22 years of work towards a zero carbon footprint economy?
Yeah...zero. Why not try?
I am a big believer in the idea that if you work you ass off towards a ridiculously big goal, even if you don't make it, you get a lot further than if you cut your potential short by thinking too small. Of course, that doesn't mean you just get up and swing for the fences every time. You can single an double a team to death and score 12 runs, but you still have to keep your eye on winning big.
However this process runs, it needs to be two things--apolitical and accessible.
If we just have politicians do this and it isn't a plan that administrations to come can't stick with, or if we just have two sides bickering on policy all the time, it will fail. This is no time for infighting.
It also needs to feel like something everyone ca get involved with. We need to organize both in person and online. Let's get back to town halls (Local USA 2030 Meetup Groups?). I liked Jeff Jarvis' idea for using Salesforce Ideas for the government.
No matter what tools we use, it needs to be talked about in barber shops, worked into school curriculums (aren't problem solving and goal setting skills that we should be teaching anyway?).
For once, I just want to feel like we know where we're going and that its a good place. That direction can't just come from Obama...we all need to be involved.
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June 25, 2008 in Politics
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June 23, 2008
links for 2008-06-23
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June 23, 2008
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