Fish Thoughts

Here is a great post  on recognizing successful companies and products take time and failures before they succeed. Belief, faith and a little insanity allows for success!

Brad Feld had a great post. In it was a line that really hit home for me,

The entrepreneurial lifestyle actually seems like a sustainable one. This opportunity has helped me realize that the life of an entrepreneur can be accomplished simply by merging the things you love with what you are good at.

A great story on NPR - remembering the engineer who tried to stop the Challenger accident. The lesson is make sure people feel they can always voice there opinion. For leadership, listen to the people who you hire. 

Listen to it here:

I do a ton of athletics. It keeps me sane. Truly it is more for the brain than the body. I am always trying new products. Recently I purchased a bluetooth wireless headset. I hate the chords from a wired headset while running and doing sports. Especially if you want to shoot baskets and listen to music in a gym, the chord simply irritates my play. I purchased a Gogroove headset:

It is a pretty nice device. It synced with my iphone 4 in seconds. Literally just hold down the power button until it flashes while looking at your bluetooth list on your iphone. It is extremely stable on my head. I ran 4 miles with it — without it falling off once. My only gripe with it so far is that it is so snug that it hurts my head behind my ears after about 25 minutes of wearing it. I wish they would put some soft cushion back there to keep it comfy.

I also purchased an iphone arm band to carry my phone while running. I have skinny arms, so finding one that works was a challenge. The Tunebelt sport armband works great. It is snug and fits my iphone even with my thin case on it. The only problem with this carrier is that the top is open, so if it rains it may not protect the device perfectly. So far this set up has been a blessing. No more trying to find a place for the iphone, no chords and loads of tunes to keep me motivated.

A great article on how deals get done with music labels.

The only solution going forward is for music services like Spotify to sign up bands directly. Good luck with that…..

Ten years after 9/11 — I am like many Americans and reflective on where I was ten years ago, and how that event (experience) has shaped both the world I live in and who I I am.

Recently I was lucky enough to be introduced to Leon and Amy Kass. Their current work written with co-editor Diana Schaub, is titled What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song. In there words:

It seeks to exploit the soul-shaping power of imaginative literature to help make Americans more appreciatively and deeply aware of who they are as citizens of the United States.

 In my view it takes some of the best literature from America’s past including songs, poems speeches etc….and helps someone truly understand the past that has formed our present.  I found it inspiring and beleive the more people who engage in the book and their broader project the better our country will become. For more information check out www.whatsoproudlywehail.org. 

A few months back, I attended a spectacular conference in NYC called The Daily Deal Summit. It was the first ever conference about the daily deal space. Here are some of the comments I heard from attending the sessions or speaking with attendee’s that resonated with me. 

Treating all your customers the same is not what the Internet is about. Delight your customers through personalization. Respect them as actual people who have actual interests.

Regarding Email Marketing:

“Consumer centric marketing must obliterate campaign centric marketing. In fact campaign centric should just  go away.”

My big take away that is still with me months after the conference:

The ability to access relevant data sets about an individual and an audience has become readily available to almost any advertiser. This allows a marketer to target more effectively to generate stronger returns for less investment. However, this access comes with a giant responsibility. As an advertiser the obligation to respect privacy but deliver relevant desirable content continues to become more difficult to discern. The daily deal space is perhaps the most obvious current manifestation of this problem. The problem is not going to disappear, in fact it is going to become even more difficult to discern. Hopefully the opt in and choice controls for the consumers receiving the adver-content (advertising and content together) will evolve as rapidly as the access to their information. 

I think the next generation browser needs to think about mobile users. The number of sessions happening on a mobile device using a browser is increasing beyond desktop or standard laptop uses at an incredible pace. However, mobile users on an iphone, droid, tablet, etc…are a slave to their network connections.

WiFi may solve some of this, but in the US getting on a good wifi signal while driving in a car is impossible. Even just going around NYC can be a major challenge. I wonder if developing technology that functions like the spotify technology does for songs would work on a browser. Clearly cache and updated images, account info are tough challenges, but if you can think it, it has a possibility. Hoping a combo of browser tools, apps, wifi, and simple switching between 4G can solve the nasty latency in browser speed on mobile.