Last week I came across (via Mashable) an interesting new entrant in the emerging category of Personal Relationship Management software: SocialMinder. They describe themselves as “an online assistant that helps you maintain relationships with your LinkedIn network,” and at the moment it’s a reasonably accurate description, but I think it understates the real potential of continue…
I’ve always been big believer in background processing, the idea that the subconscious brain is always working to solve problems whether we’re aware of it or not. So I was delighted to stumble across a recent New Yorker article describing a group of neuroscientists who had actually mapped and isolated the mechanisms by which this continue…
One of the little luxuries afforded by last week’s getaway was the chance to read a book cover-to-cover (somehow having kids has crushed my ability to carve out uninterrupted reading time). I took two books on the trip but only finished one: Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau. I was already familiar with the idea of continue…
I got a call two Saturdays ago from a childhood friend who now lives in LA. A family trip to Utah had just fallen through but he didn’t want to cancel entirely; could I get away for a few days midweek to join him in the desert? I checked my calendar, talked to my wife, continue…
I’ve been putting off writing this post in the faint hope that I’d come up the learning curve and all would be well, but I can’t put it off any longer. In my last post, Embracing the Cloud, I described my decision to wander off the operating system reservation and pick up an Asus Eee continue…
As Andy mentioned, our office (in fact, our entire building) was broken into on Monday night. The burglars were laptop specialists, leaving behind all but one desktop (a brand new Mac tower) and more than a dozen flat-panel displays. My laptop was among those stolen, giving me an opportunity to reflect on my personal computing continue…
I’m a big fan of Neal Stephenson’s brand of “realistic” science fiction (Snow Crash is one of my all-time favorites), so this TechCrunch headline caught my eye: “Neal Stephenson’s New Novel Makes Me Want to Kill the Internet“. The headlined post is a review of Stephenson’s new novel, Anathem, and in it the reviewer describes continue…
I’ve been messing around with email/communications ideas for a little while now, and one of the threads I’ve been tugging on lately is the concept of “ambient” social interactions, exchanges that take place in the context of other online activities (as opposed to in the inbox / IM window). There are lots of interesting ideas continue…
No matter what business they’re in, the first and hardest problem for any early-stage Web company is distribution. Everything else about doing business online gets cheaper and easier every day, but with an ever-accelerating proliferation of new sites and services, it only becomes more difficult for each new offering to acquire an audience of loyal continue…
A big chunk of my time goes to meeting with early-stage entrepreneurs. My goals for these meetings are: to get to know the founders as people, to learn about their product and business strategy, and to talk about whether and how we (Founders Co-op) might be able to help them. At some point in these continue…