matt's posterous

Every individual is now a small business; your brand matters

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman:  One of my theses is that every
individual is now a small business; how you manage your own personal
career is the exact way you manage a small business. Your brand
matters. That is how LinkedIn operates.

From WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704224004574487750190885402.html

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The fax generation moves online

Ariana Huffington: People like Arthur Schlesinger and Norman Mailer
probably would never have been online, because they were not digital
natives; Arthur Schlesinger would fax me his blogs. We provided a
platform for them.

From WSJ: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704026204575266513147033900.html

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On chasing quick money...

From Daniel Lyons in Newsweek:

The Valley has become a casino, a place where smart kids arrive hoping to make an easy fortune building companies that seem, if not pointless, at least not as serious as, say, old-guard companies like HP, Intel, Cisco, and Apple.

The three hottest tech companies today are Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga. What, exactly, do they do? 

The risk is that by focusing an entire generation of bright young entrepreneurs on such silly things, we’ll fall behind in creating the fundamental building blocks of our economy. The transistor and the integrated circuit gave rise to the last half century of prosperity. But what comes next?

We’ve already fallen behind in areas like alternative energy, better batteries, and nanotechnology. Instead of racing to catch up, we’re buying seeds and garden gnomes on Facebook.

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/24/the-sad-truth-about-the-facebook-movie.html

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A family finder phone app

Hmm, this part sounds very familiar…

"[Whereoscope] taps into the device’s GPS- and Wi-Fi-based positioning system, sending users alerts about the locations of family members whose phones are also running the app. Parents, for example, can set the app to tell them when a child arrives at or leaves a certain place, such as their school or sports practice. Users can also set the app to tell them when a family member approaches within a certain distance. If you’re cooking dinner and waiting for your spouse to get home from work, for example, Whereoscope can send you an alert when they drive across an adjustable boundary line (called a “geofence” in the location business) anywhere from 1 mile to 20 miles away."

This part wasn't possible until recently...

"As of last week, 3,500 people were using the service, and the number is increasing16 percent per week on average."

http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/09/20/do-you-know-where-your-child-or-husband-or-girlfriend-is-whereoscope-can-tell-you/

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Will CLEAR replace comcast in my home? I'll know soon. #clearmeetup

Img_20100909_190302
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Bowling pin model: Facebook started with Harvard, Yelp started with San Francisco singles

http://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin-strategy/

Chris Dixon:

A huge challenge for user-generated websites is attracting users and contributors when you are starting with zero content. One way to approach this challenge is to use what Geoffrey Moore calls the bowling pin strategy.

Facebook executed the bowling pin strategy brilliantly by starting at Harvard and then spreading out to other colleges and eventually the general public.  If Facebook started out with, say, 1000 users spread randomly across the world, it wouldn’t have been very useful to anyone.  But having the first 1000 users at Harvard made it extremely useful to Harvard students.  Those students in turn had friends at other colleges, allowing Facebook to hop from one school to another.

Yelp also used a bowling pin strategy by focusing first on getting critical mass in one location – San Francisco – and then expanding out from there.  They also focused on activities that (at the time) social networking users favored: dining out, clubbing and shopping. Contrast this to their direct competitors that were started around the same time, were equally well funded, yet have been far less successful.

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Fascinating use of MTurk by @marshallk

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_use_mechanical_turk_to_rock_confe...

'I created a template in Mechanical Turk that basically said: "Look at
this person's name and description. Find their Twitter username, their
organization's blog or website, tell me if they appear to be Male or
Female and whether they appear to work inside or outside the US. For
each name you do this for, I will pay you 20 cents." The end result
was that I got all that info about 256 people very quickly, mostly in
a few hours but 100% complete overnight, for just over $50. It was
very much worth it.'

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Mobile Monday at Google Cambridge MA on August 16th

http://googleandroid.eventbrite.com/
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In 90s, NYC had 250k homeless, but only 2500 were chronically homeless. Those 2500 cost $62m.

http://www.gladwell.com/2006/2006_02_13_a_murray.html

Fifteen years ago, a young Boston College graduate student named Dennis Culhane lived in a shelter in Philadelphia for seven weeks as part of the research for his dissertation...  Culhane then put together a database—the first of its kind—to track who was coming in and out of the shelter system.... In the early nineteen-nineties, Culhane's database suggested that New York City had a quarter of a million people who were homeless at some point in the previous half decade —which was a surprisingly high number. But only about twenty-five hundred were chronically homeless....  Culhane estimates that in New York at least sixty-two million dollars was being spent annually to shelter just those twenty-five hundred hard-core homeless.

In Denver, John Hickenlooper, the city's enormously popular mayor, has worked on the homelessness issue tirelessly during the past couple of years…  He has commissioned studies to show what a drain on the city's resources the homeless population has become. But, he says, "there are still people who stop me going into the supermarket and say, 'I can't believe you're going to help those homeless people, those bums.'"

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“When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much happier this way” from nyt

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/earth/12suburb.html?_r=3&em

Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community. Car ownership is allowed, but there are only two places to park — large garages at the edge of the development, where a car-owner buys a space, for $40,000, along with a home.

As a result, 70 percent of Vauban’s families do not own cars, and 57 percent sold a car to move here. “When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much happier this way,” said Heidrun Walter, a media trainer and mother of two, as she walked verdant streets where the swish of bicycles and the chatter of wandering children drown out the occasional distant motor.

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