2011 As Good Times for Entrepreneurs?
By Tim Berry
So, on last day of the year, eve of a new year and (I think … correct me if I’m wrong) a new decade, Steve Blank posted his optimistic 2011 may mark the beginning of a golden era for entrepreneurs on VentureBeat. He cites several reason, all of which make sense to me: Compressing the... Read More »
Does the Kindle Tell You Something About Your Pricing?
By Tim Berry
While I tend to think pricing too low is one of the most common mistakes in small business, there’s still something to be said for finding the pricing sweet spot. Sometimes elasticity works. For example, in Amazon says it has sold millions of Kindles This Quarter, Business Insider notes: Amazon [says it] has “already sold... Read More »
Do We Give a Damn About Public Schools?
By Tim Berry
Last Thursday I attended an evening meeting at a local public school that’s on the close-down list as our school district (4J in Eugene, OR) reels in shock over massive budget cuts. I have a 7-year-old grandson in first grade at that school, so I joined his mom at the meeting. It was a sad... Read More »
Graphic Evidence of What We Value Most
By Tim Berry
Like it or not, your real priority, my real priority, our society’s real priority shows up not in what we say but in how we spend our resources, including, of course, how we spend our time. Time is the scarcest resource. Author David McCandless at Information is Beautiful called it Cognitive Surplus Visualized in honor... Read More »
Free is Fashionable, But Still, Beware of Free Lunches
By Tim Berry
I’ve been thinking about this Free business a lot. There’s Chris Anderson’s book Free, and the debate around it. There’s free content everywhere. I find great free photos on Flickr. And I read free blogs every day. It’s not like free is all that new. I grew up with free radio and television, funded by advertising.... Read More »
A New Dimension of Haves and Have-Nots
By Tim Berry
Wow. Talk about misreading data. They found clusters of autism and looked for pollution or some such problem as a cause, but found something entirely different, and probably just as significant. You have to read this, on NPR: Autism ‘Clusters’ Linked To Parents’ Education. It turns out that… Clusters of children diagnosed with autism tend... Read More »
On Cities, Food, History, and Future
By Tim Berry
In honor of Blog Action Day, the video here is a 15-minute TED talk by Carolyn Steel, author and architect. Among the startling things she says here: We lose about 47 million acres of rainforest every year. And at the same time, we lose about 50 million acres of farm land to salinization and erosion.... Read More »
Top 10 Unconventional Recession Indicators
By Tim Berry
I found this on the Huffington Post over the weekend: Top Ten Unconventional Indicators Of The Recession. It’s a slide show, more fun there than here, but in case you’re interested: Home movie rentals: up during recession. Netflix, Redbox and others are way up over last year. From The Atlantic. Urban farming: More people grow... Read More »
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