Web/Tech

Blog Disaster Swallowed Two Weeks of Posts Today

April 21, 2011

Yes, it is restored now, but if you looked at this blog during the 30 hours or so before 1 pm Friday April 22 it would have appeared that I hadn’t posted since April 6: no, I just lost (temporarily thank goodness) two weeks of posts to an Amazon EC2 problem. The cloud computing temporarily [...]

Read the full article →

A Few Good Posts for a Friday

April 1, 2011

These are some posts I recommended reading this week. My absolute favorite this week was Mark Suster’s 9 Women Can’t Make a Baby in a Month, on TechCrunch. Mark’s Both Sides of the Table is a great blog, by the way. And this is the thought at the heart of that post: Over funding often [...]

Read the full article →

Do You Trip on the Tools in Your Own Business?

March 31, 2011

Think of the quick comedy scene where a guy steps on a rake and bonks himself in the face with a handle.  Got it? Now ask yourself whether or not you’re bonking yourself with the tech tools in your own business. For example, do you switch your to-do list software instead of working the list? [...]

Read the full article →

You Can't Eat Truth Either … But it Still Matters

March 28, 2011

As blogger, former full-time journalist, and long-term entrepreneur, I’m offended from all three sides by journalists complaining that bloggers don’t get paid on the Huffington Post. I’m offended by the envy. The money Arianna Huffington and her investors made on the sale of Huffington Post to AOL was classic entrepreneurship, earned by taking risks. They [...]

Read the full article →

Proving Again that Business Ideas Have no Value

March 22, 2011

Hold a mirror up to a mirror, and you get some kind of representation of infinity, or something like infinity, intriguing but hard to explain. Just do it. That’s something like what happened to me yesterday with a riff on business ideas. It started with my first view ideaswatch.com, which is a new website where [...]

Read the full article →

Is Search-Driven Entrepreneurship Obsolete?

March 17, 2011

Remember that dream we all had together, not so long ago, where a well-thought-out startup with a good understanding of the Web could grow on merit alone? Isn’t that sort of what Google did? And many others? I fear that’s not happening anymore. For a good, short summary of the SEO problem, from a brilliant [...]

Read the full article →

Never Confuse a Domain Name With Marketing

March 16, 2011

Once upon a time I ran into a group of entrepreneurs who had a business plan based on the simple power of a domain name. I won’t say what that name really was, but let’s pretend it was books.com. In their business plan they touted their ownership of this domain name repeatedly. But they had [...]

Read the full article →

Disturbing Look at Search Engine Innards

February 15, 2011

I was browsing the NYTimes online yesterday when I discovered Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets. I couldn’t stop reading. Author David Segal investigates the dark side of search engine optimization in a story that blends mystery and suspense while it gives good background of something that affects most everyone who owns a business. [...]

Read the full article →

Business Landscapes Change. Giants Fade.

February 2, 2011

Quick thought for the day: business landscapes change.  Giants fall. Startups become giants. The giant, the big power, that everybody fears, and by whom everybody wants to be acquired … it’s Google these days. It used to be Microsoft. Are you familiar with Lotus 1-2-3? There was a time when Lotus was the giant of [...]

Read the full article →

What Does Creativity Have to Do With Business?

November 2, 2010

What does creativity have to do with business? Business is about dollars and deadlines and suits, while creativity is about nerds and long hair and artsy-fartsy. Or is it? As the digital technology revolution matures, it is becoming more about creativity and less about engineering. That’s quoting Fred Wilson, venture capitalist and thought leader, in [...]

Read the full article →