July 2007
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Innovative Friends: Alex Wright
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1 min read
I’m psyched that Alex Wright now calls New York home. He is one of the few thinkers of technology and information that can simultaneously ply his trade during the day and theorize with the best in his spare time. I’m looking forward to his new book Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages in which he…
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How to Manage Your Incoming Email
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1 min read
I haven’t had a chance to check out Mark Hurst’s newish book, Bit Literacy, but I was just listening to a talk he did for Ted a couple years ago on how to manage your incoming email, and I’m going to dive in and try it. Here’s the essential steps: The overarching goal is to…
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Note to Self: Resist Accepting Millions of Dollars
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2 min read
Something to keep in mind just in case someone ever wants to throw several million my way… I still don’t think you should raise as much as you can, for several reasons, but I’ll just highlight the most important. You will spend what you raise. If you raise $10 million, you will quickly ramp up…
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How Can Start Ups Grow?
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1 min read
Another perspective that might be lost in the rush toward innovation… “Assistant professor Mukti Khaire believes that small companies can grow by developing intangible social resources such as legitimacy, status, and reputation. In an interesting twist, her research on this insight is that these intangible resources may be best acquired by following a road of…
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Great Design Story of Spaghetti Sauce
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1 min read
It feels unnecessary to link to any particular Ted Talk since so many of them are so good, but I will point out one or two of the many I’ve been watching lately while I fight off a cold from my sofa. Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of the man who invented the spaghetti sauce…
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Photographer Recommendation in New York
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1 min read
I splurged on a new headshot recently and was lucky to find Carla Coria, a photographer here in Brooklyn, New York who does amazing work with a simple studio and a digital camera. She made prep easy and effective, the shoot as fast and painless as possible, and a week later had a final shot…
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BLKN 2.0 Meetup
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1 min read
Our lovely borough of Brooklyn now has its own web meetup… Some of the best networking I’ve ever done is while walking my dog, Henry, in Prospect Park. This morning, after I had just met yet one more person who works on web projects, I thought, we all take the train to Manhattan to attend…
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“Unnerved” in NYC by Explosion
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1 min read
There was an explosion in midtown Manhattan yesterday, about 4 blocks from where I was working… The New York Times reported today that New Yorkers were “unnerved” which was certainly the case on the street when it happened. With the constant reminders of terrorism the government scares the shit out of everyone (and gains support…
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Launched!
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1 min read
The first SmartEx class was taught this week and went off without a hitch. While it’s a real working course from the students’ point of view, behind the scenes I’m using it as a prototype to quickly learn better ways of doing everything schools do. I was even planning to take a hit financially in…
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1 000 000 000 000 Bytes, In My Pocket
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1 min read
Moore’s Law is alive and well I confirmed recently while shopping for an external hard drive. You can now buy a name brand 1TB (terabyte, or 1000 gigabytes) drive for about $400. That’s 40 cents per gig. I can remember when under $10/MB was pretty good.
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The Cost of The Ferrari Brand? At Least $390 Million
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1 min read
Ezra Dyer puts Ferrari’s brand-production decisions in perspective: Ferrari had 1,000 orders for the $650,000 Enzo after the car was unveiled in 2002, but the company stuck to its decision to build only 399 cars (plus one for the pope). By my math, that means it left $390,000,000 on the table in the name of…