Noise Between Stations

Month: July 2007

  • Innovative Friends: Alex Wright

    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 surveys the history of methods for managing oceans of information for clues of where we’re headed.

    And I’m tickled that he received a review from James Burke of BBC’s Connections, how appropriate…

    This is a must-read for anybody who wants to understand where we’ve been and where we’re going. A lucid, exciting book full of flashes of surprise about how we’ve done it all before: prehistoric beads as networking aids, 3rd century random access systems, 7th century Irish monastic bloggers, 11th century multimedia, 16th century hypertext. I wish I’d written it!

  • How to Manage Your Incoming Email

    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 keep your inbox empty because inboxes are not good task lists. To get it empty in the first place, consider triage.

    There’s four steps to follow:

    1. Go to the most important emails first, i.e. personal emails from family and friends. Get them out of the inbox by replying, forwarding, printing, filing, whatever.
    2. Go to the least important emails next — FYIs, Newsletters, etc. Read them now or delete them. Do not save them.
    3. Go to action items that require two minutes or less. Do each action item right now and delete or file the message.
    4. What’s left is action items that take longer than two minutes. Move these onto a proper to do list then file or delete.

  • Note to Self: Resist Accepting Millions of Dollars

    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 to a burn rate of $800k a month, because the investors don’t want their money to sit in a bank account earning interest with 36 months of runway while you hire employees 2 and 3. The amount of money you raise sets you off on a course at a specific pace. Your board will want to know why you aren’t deploying capital. You will hire a marketing team because you can afford to hire a marketing team. You will hire a vp of sales before the product is ready because you can afford to hire a VP of sales. Companies that raise $10 million dollar A rounds don’t raise $5 million dollar B rounds, they raise $30 million dollar B rounds. If you have not accurately predicted how quickly you can grow the top line, you will quickly find that the cap table has gotten away from you, and you will have less flexibility to build the company the way you might like to if the market zigs when you thought it would zag. You want to give yourself the flexibility and room to react to market forces so that you can build the best company possible.

  • How Can Start Ups Grow?

    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 conformity in how your company is organized and presented to the outside world…

    “These social resources are acquired by mimicking the structures and activities of established firms, and by affiliating with high-status customers respectively,” she wrote…

    How Can Start Ups Grow?

    I’d like to see this research layered on top of the disruptive innovation research to see if there’s any correlation between doing something new but appearing to be the same old reliable thing.

  • Great Design Story of Spaghetti Sauce

    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 flavors we have today. It’s a great lesson in how asking new questions and going back to customers can change an entire market category. And Gladwell tells the story without talking about design or innovation or anything of that sort. He looks through the eyes of one passionate individual.

    I think the commitment of individuals more than anything is what makes these kinds of advances possible, more about that in a post that’s still in draft mode.

  • Photographer Recommendation in New York

    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 plus 200 others all ready on a DVD. And if she made me look decent, you know she’s got skills.

  • BLKN 2.0 Meetup

    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 Web meetups.

    Why not have a Web oriented Meetup in Brooklyn?

    Most of my Internet-design-etc. friends live in Brooklyn, most within walking distance of me, so I’m starting to think we’re developing a technie ghetto out here.

  • “Unnerved” in NYC by Explosion

    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 for the war in Iraq?) instead of reminding us how incredibly resilient we are when needed.

  • Launched!

    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 the interest of testing, but enough people signed up to make it profitable too.

    Incidentally, I love the local retail stores that proudly display the first cash they made, posting bills on the walls. Here’s my digital equivalent of that, a screen shot after the first students signed up…

    First smartex signups

  • 1 000 000 000 000 Bytes, In My Pocket

    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.

  • The Cost of The Ferrari Brand? At Least $390 Million

    Ferrari Enzo

    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 exclusivity and almighty demand. With those 600 never-built Enzos, Ferrari essentially invested $390 million in its own legend.

    Because nothing whips rich people into a frenzy quite like telling them they can’t have something.