Joe Kraus writes:
Theres never been a better time to be an entrepreneur because its never been cheaper to be one. Heres one example.
Excite.com took $3,000,000 to get from idea to launch. JotSpot took $100,000.
Why on earth is there a 30X difference? Theres probably a lot of reasons, but here are my top four.
– Hardware is 100X cheaper
– Infrastructure software is free
– Access to Global Labor Markets
– SEM changes everything
What are we waiting for in India?
[via Atanu] New Scientist suggests 11 steps to a better brain. Among them:
Never underestimate the power of a good night’s rest
SKIMPING on sleep does awful things to your brain. Planning, problem-solving, learning, concentration,working memory and alertness all take a hit. IQ scores tumble. “If you have been awake for 21 hours straight, your abilities are equivalent to someone who is legally drunk,” says Sean Drummond from the University of California, San Diego. And you don’t need to pull an all-nighter to suffer the effects: two or three late nights and early mornings on the trot have the same effect.
Luckily, it’s reversible – and more. If you let someone who isn’t sleep-deprived have an extra hour or two of shut-eye, they perform much better than normal on tasks requiring sustained attention, such taking an exam. And being able to concentrate harder has knock-on benefits for overall mental performance. “Attention is the base of a mental pyramid,” says Drummond. “If you boost that, you can’t help boosting everything above it.”
These are not the only benefits of a decent night’s sleep. Sleep is when your brain processes new memories, practises and hones new skills – and even solves problems. Say you’re trying to master a new video game. Instead of grinding away into the small hours, you would be better off playing for a couple of hours, then going to bed. While you are asleep your brain will reactivate the circuits it was using as you learned the game, rehearse them, and then shunt the new memories into long-term storage. When you wake up, hey presto! You will be a better player. The same applies to other skills such as playing the piano, driving a car and, some researchers claim, memorising facts and figures. Even taking a nap after training can help, says Carlyle Smith of Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.
PaidContent writes:
Some 32 startups presented at the “Under The Radar” conference in SF last week, and were judged on various criterion. The winning list is one to go through, to get an idea of the kind of new companies in digital media sector:
— Mobile App Startups: GoTV, a mobile video/TV startup, won the approval from VC judges and audience…
— Search Startups: Medio, a mobile search starup, won this category…
— Social Software & Tools Startups: Peerflix, an online DVD trading starup, won the judges approval…
— Digital Home & Entertainment Startups: PureDepth, a digital display tech firm, won hands down…
WSJ writes that for a soaring Google, the next act will not be as easy.
There are growing signs that Google is finished with the easy stuff. Its attempts to search other information — starting with books, TV and scholarly works — promise to be more costly and time-consuming than the simple Web searches that propelled its first years of growth.
For starters, what Google wants to do will be more labor-intensive. Its Web searches have been mostly automated, keeping staffing down and profit margins fat. Now it may have to undertake the costly conversion of older TV programs and other material into digital form, although new material is increasingly available digitally. It has already begun employing humans to screen content such as video for objectionable material.
More problematic is the issue of copyrights. As Google moves onto turf where companies are more protective of their intellectual property, it faces the prospect of getting sued or slogging through negotiations with thousands of rights holders.
Paul Thurrott writes: “Here is the story of MSN’s rebirth as an Internet services powerhouse. In part one, I quickly examine the convoluted history of MSN, which has been repurposed and re-imagined repeatedly during its decade-long life. In part two, you’ll learn about the internal reorganization that finally put the division on the right path, the new customer-centric mantra that drives all of its product development, and its historic decision to take on Google in search. In part three, I’ll examine MSN’s other services, including MSN Messenger, MSN Spaces, and MSN Music, and Hotmail.” [1 2 3]
The Feature has an article by Howard Rheingold who has co-authored a report and visual map of technologies of co-operation.
Although we report about technologies, the power of these tools derives from the social practices they amplify — specifically the ways people, machines and institutions can cooperate. These emerging digital technologies present new opportunities to change the way people work together to solve problems and generate wealth. Central to this class of cooperation-amplifying technologies are eight key clusters, each with distinctive contributions to scientific, economic, social and political forms of collective action:
Group-forming networks support the emergence of self-organized subgroups within a large-scale network, creating exponential growth of the network and shortening the social distance among members of the network.
Social software makes explicit, amplifies and extends many of the informal cooperative structures and processes that have evolved as part of human culture, providing the tools and awareness to guide people in intelligently constructing and managing these processes to specific ends.
[via The Pondering Primate] MediaPost writes:
THE LATIN ROOT OF “ADVERTISE”–ADVERTERE–LITERALLY means “to turn towards.” It is the same root for the word “adversary.” This sense of confrontation at the essence of advertising may be what undergoes the most radical change in the next decade of marketing sponsorship. Contrary to popular wisdom, consumers do not hate advertising per se. People continue to buy through catalogs that arrive in their mailboxes; search advertising is booming because people click ads targeted to their queries; and we can all hum a dozen favorite TV jingles.
Yet, in this world of hyper-fragmented media and too many marketing messages, consumers are acting to avoid the overload, paying for the unadulterated media they want, and investing in technology to strip out unwanted ads. With the skyrocketing popularity of blogging and TiVo, iPods, NetFlix, and peer-to-peer networks, consumers are starting to expect more control over their entire media experience, a phenomenon at odds with interruptive advertising.
Procter & Gamble Chief Marketing Officer Jim Stengel told the audience at the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ media conference last year: “All marketing should be permission marketing. All marketing should be so appealing that consumers want us in their lives.”
“Permission marketing” may not be the best phrase to describe the new era of marketing that is already beginning to take shape. “Service marketing” may be closer to the idea.
HBS Working Knowledge has an article by Donald Sull with Yong Wang:
Entrepreneurs and managers must consider not just one, but multiple, windows of opportunityincluding customers, competitors, capital markets, technical evolution, and government policy among others. To further complicate matters, these windows vary in importance over time and are constantly shiftingopening a crack or threatening to close altogether. As a result, entrepreneurs must get the timing right to get through the windows that matter.
To simplify the task of evaluating the timing, it is helpful to focus on three windows of opportunity, specifically customers, competitors, and context (including external factors other than buyers and rivals), which consistently matter in evaluating whether the timing is right to pursue an opportunity. Many people have discussed time-based competition, in which the faster rival beats the slower. The three windows of opportunity model, in contrast, focuses on timing-based competition. There is no assumption that faster always trumps slower. Wahaha, for example, pioneered the children’s nutritional drink segment. In other cases, however, Wahaha followed early entrants who educated consumers on the benefits of enriched milk, bottled waters, and cola. Success depends on concentrating resources on the right opportunity at the right time. Getting the timing right, to a large extent, requires managers to make their move when all three factors are aligned. Timing will, of course, also be influenced by internal factors. Much of timing, however, depends on forces largely outside the control of an entrepreneur or manager.
Jeremy Wagstaff writes about an alternative to RSS:
They’re called widgets, or dashboards, or both, and they do more or less everything RSS feeds do, but they also do a lot of things RSS feeds don’t do, or at least don’t do as simply. Which might make them perfect for you.
One of the downsides, to me, of newsreaders is that they pretty much take up the same amount of desktop space as your browser or your email program: namely, most of it. And you need to switch from what you’re doing in Microsoft Word or Outlook, or wherever you spend most of your day, to see what’s going on in the RSS world. This is OK for folk like me who read RSS feeds like they were my daily newspaper. But what if you just want to check the sports results, any updates to your company Web site, or the weather?
This is where the widget works well. Widgets are basically little jigsaw bits of software that sit anywhere on your desktop, taking up very little space. Once you’ve installed the basic software, you select the widgets you want from the program’s homepage and you’re ready to go. Each widget is a self-contained feed, delivering its own bits of information to that corner of your screen. But what kind of information? Well, depending on what kind of widget you’ve installed, it could be anything from newly arriving emails for you to a video stream from a traffic camera on your route home. It could be any outstanding auctions you’re interested in at eBay or a shipment from FedEx you’re tracking. All of these little slices of data could appear on your screen in separate little unobtrusive windows, placed wherever you want them, updating automatically.
I think of widgets as single-item RSS feeds — where the permalink stays the same and the item gets updated in-place.
Dana Blankenhorn writes:
The 1990s were all about the Internet. (The picture is from a great site called i-Learnt, for teachers interested in technology.)
This decade is all about gadgets.
Digital cameras, musical phones, PSPs, iPods — these are the things that define our time. While they can be connected to networks their functions are mainly those of clients.
In some ways it’s a “back to the future” time for technology. We haven’t had such a client-driven decade since the 1970s, when it was all about the PC.
In some ways this was inevitable. The major network trend is wireless, so we need a new class of unwired clients.
And that’s really the missing word in this decade — applications. Most of what we’ve been doing has been replicating what was done before, only with smaller devices. Software development, especially network software development, has not moved forward. We have consolidation in the software space because we don’t have enough innovation there.
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