Netizen

Friday, April 17, 2009

Visionary Entrepreneurs Will Recreate The World

That Plateau Feeling

Unless the political leadership gets the fundamentals right, there is not too much room for the entrepreneurs to play. Warren Buffett has said he could not have done what he has done if he were not in America. The soccer field is necessary. The referees matter fundamentally. The paint buckets matter to the artist. But great soccer is played by great soccer players. I compare visionary entrepreneurs to great soccer players.

Visionary entrepreneurs will lead the green tech revolution. Visionary entrepreneurs will create the next generation financial institutions. Visionary entrepreneurs will make it possible for the world to pour a trillion dollars into microfinance. Visionary entrepreneurs will create the next generation jobs, companies and industries so that Brazil, Russia, India, China and others maturing economically is good not bad news for America.

Political leaders have to provide the soccer field. It is good to see them hard at work.

In The News

Gmail now knows who you want to e-mail
The Web In Numbers: The Rise of Social Media
Twitter's big day? Here comes Oprah
Second Life's economy is the envy of the real world
Teen Twitter worm writer gets job, spreads new worm
EPA calls greenhouse gases a public threat

[PDF] The Technology Entrepreneur’s Guidebook
Famous Technology Entrepreneurs
Study: A profile of the U.S. tech entrepreneur | News Blog - CNET News
Wired Campus: New Study Debunks Myth That Most Tech Entrepreneurs ... the median and average age at which U.S.-born entrepreneurs founded their technology and engineering companies was 39

Startup company - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

High Tech Startup Valuation Estimator
Ten questions for a high-tech startup | Tech News on ZDNet
Adam's Advice and Reading List for High Tech Startup Entrepeneurs

Entrepreneur.com
Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship - Starting and Running Your Own ...
Entrepreneurs and Small Business News and Information

That Plateau Feeling

(Krugman, December 2007)

Image via Wikipedia

There was the original bailout before America even had elections. Then there was the jumbo stimulus package. And then the G20 summit where the world leaders took substantive action. Next thing you know good news started trickling out of Wall Street. It is not exactly time to throw a party yet. There is no boom feeling. But I have a feeling the big crisis that has been blowing hot and cold for the past eight months might have plateaued.

The good news is the steep fall part of the bungee jump might be over. The bad news is there is no telling how long the plateau might last. The worse news is we are not in the upswing phase yet. And you still hear the sound of glass being broken.

The US economy, and the global economy are such big monsters, it is hard for any government to steer them in any direction at any speed. It is kind of like trying to give a 180 degree turn to the Titanic.

For the past decade we have talked of global warming, and we have talked of global terror. But we were not exactly talking global finance. Imagine twice as many hurricanes any given year. Imagine 10 dirty bombs in the 10 big cities of the world on the same day. Those would be the climate and terror versions of what we have been going through in finance.

The pain has been very real, and ultimately it is for the political leadership to steer a course. We have to have a healthy, robust debate all along. We have to be creative, inventive. We have to do the sane thing, the right thing. We have to think long term. We are in this together. This is one world, one planet, one globe.

Onto A Nuclear Weapons Free Planet
A Single Global Currency, A Global New Deal, A Global Economic Council
A Brighter Future Ahead
Old White Men Need To Chew Gum
Needed: A New Global Financial Architecture
The State Of The Union Will Be Strong
Mideast: Permanent Peace Is Possible
Stimulus: Make It A Trillion
Stimulus: Size Matters
Global Finance, Global Terrorism, Global Warming

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Blogging Tips

Darren Rowse: How I Make Money Blogging

Image via Wikipedia

Seth Godin: How to Get Traffic to Your Blog
Rand Fiskin: 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic
Skellie: 25 Paths to an Insanely Popular Blog
Yaro Starak: Why Don’t Bloggers Understand Email Marketing?
Maki: 6 Fool-Proof Steps to Make More Money With Your Website
Liz Strauss:

Chris Brogan:

0 Tweets, 30,000 Followers: Could That Be Oprah?

Image via Wikipedia

Yes, it is. Only Oprah can do something ridiculous like that. And I got the Oprah-On-Twitter news from a woman whose middle name is 8 and who is one of the more prolific litterers of my Facebook stream, no complaints. Yes, 8. Yes, the digital age 8. She is so digital. No surprise she dates a Googler. (Craig Silverstein)

Oh Oh Oprah
O O Oprah, Sa Sa Santa
Oprah Needs To Hit The Campaign Trail

I think Twitter has arrived. What do you think? I mean, what is more mainstream than getting Oprah's attention? The Twitter people's gonna celebrate.

I have to admit I have never watched a complete Oprah show. But I think the woman is fascinating and lovely. She has an amazing life story. She is my idea of an out of the box thinker. She has said if she had been given a dollar for every time she was told not to do something but she did it anyways, she would have made a billion. I think she did make a billion.

https://twitter.com/Oprah

My excuse. I don't own a TV. And she is not on YouTube.

Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Guess what I also just noticed. Zemanta now shows you articles from this blog Netizen. Zemanta has arrived.

That StartUp Mentality (2)

Image via CrunchBase

Larry Ellison's first wife left him. During the counseling before the divorce, Ellison said he will make a million dollars if she stayed with him. The wife laughed. They were barely getting by. Ellison worked just enough to pay his share of bills, and not more. One day he went ahead and bought a boat, made a down payment. That sent the wife into therapy. At his peak his net worth was close to 50 billion.
His second wife would put on make up before going to sleep and spend the night face up. Logic? So she did not have to rush in the morning.
His third wife left him for a Harvard MBA. He wrote to a friend. "Congratulations on getting and staying married."
Michael Dell started his computer business in his college dorm. One day his parents called from the airport. We are here to see you. He managed to get all his stuff into his neighbor's bathroom just in time.
Einstein was thought of as a no good student at high school. He barely managed to pass the entrance exams to college. When he was working on the Theory of Relativity, people routinely described him as someone "lazy."
After Steve Wozniak designed the PC, he took the prototype to his bosses at HP. They were utterly uninterested. When Steve Jobs found out Wozniak had done that, he was enraged.
The two YouTube guys had been swiping credit cards not long before they got bought by Google for $1.5 billion.
The two Google guys early on wanted to be bought by Yahoo. Yahoo was uninterested in them. Yahoo could have had the Google search engine for a few tens of millions.
One of the two Google founders Sergei Brin would go on dates in 2000, and he noticed there never were second dates. Women did not return calls. He had a dot com that had never made a dime. That did not look sexy when dot coms were going down left and right. Larry Page jokes that was a big reason they went from doing search only to search and ads. Later it has become search, ads and apps.
Amitabh Bachchan is the most recognized face on the planet, he has ruled the Hindi film industry for about four decades now. I grew up watching him. I used to imitate his hairstyle. I am trying to do it again. In his late 20s, early 30s, he had a decent job in Calcutta. He had a company car, for one, a big deal for the India of the late 1960s. He quit that job and went to Mumbai to give acting a shot. His mother was not happy. He had to struggle for a few years. He had a few flops in a row. Then he got a huge hit, and he never looked back. He is an ultimate family man.
One day Sam Walton showed up in Manhattan at an investment bank. I want to take my company public, who do I talk to, he asked the receptionist. Although Walmart was in debt, the fundamentals of the company were strong. After the receptionist found out he was from Arkansas, she took him to see this lone soul from Arkansas who worked at that bank.
For the longest time after founding Walmart, Walton did not need college graduates. College graduates were over educated and often lacking in basic common sense for the kinds of tasks he had. Then the company grew, and the first string of college graduates started to apply for jobs. The founding team got suspicious.
Bill Gates said he imagined he was going to be a millionaire, even a multi-millionaire, but that he never imagined he was going to be a billionaire.
When Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar, he went on a tour of Europe. He met families of his Oxford friends. They routinely suggested he should come back to their country as ambassador.
When Warren Buffett launched his company, he approached a neighbor, friend. College education is getting expensive these days, he said. If you were to invest 10K in my company, by the time your kids grow up and are ready for college, that investment should take care of their college expenses, he said. The friend refused to invest. That 10K today would have been worth 300 million.
From the book, Soft War, An Intimate Portrait Of Larry Ellison And Oracle by Matthew Symonds, with commentary by Larry Ellison, pages 337-38.

Jimmy says, "I've talked this over with Larry several times, and there's a big difference of perception about this. I was at home with my parents when we got a call from Larry. My father had a long talk with him over the phone, and when he hung up, he said: 'Larry's in trouble. He wants to start a company, and he needs money.' At that time, he'd just become a judge and his salary had dropped dramatically from what he'd been making as a lawyer, but he said, 'I'm not going to say no to the kid.' He went into my sister's savings account and sent him $6,000. The feeling was, he's calling us for help and we'll do all we can for him." Ellison's version is indeed a little different: "I told them that Oracle would go public in about a year or so and that anything they invested in the stock now would increase by a factor of ten. Of course, at the time they honestly believed that they would never see any of their money ever again. In spite of that, they gave me the money. It was an act of kindness. And it turned out to be a pretty good investment too." *

* LE writes: I was wrong about Oracle stock's increasing in value by a factor of ten; it increased by a factor of ten thousand.

CJ Components: Military Handsets

CJ Component Products is based out of the Greater New York area and specializes in tactical communication tools used by the army - ground, air and naval, and the police and the first responders. The company also does contract manufacturing. CJ is a leader in its category. It is open to new design concepts from its major customers.

Their primary presence is in the defense industry. Their handsets are different from similar devices used in other sectors. They tend to be more robust and designed to function in all weather conditions.

Some of their offerings are as follows.

Military handset
Lightweight handset
Tactical handset: Used for small group communication at the frontline of action.
Tactical wireless headsets

(This is an advertisement.)

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

That StartUp Mentality

Image via Wikipedia

It is a mindset. It is a personality type. If a tech entrepreneur were not a tech entrepreneur, he/she would be standing at the edge of a cliff, or facing a hurricane on the high seas. There is something innate about risk-taking. Very few attempt it. Very few of those who attempt succeed. That is why the rewards are so astoundingly huge.

But then that startup mentality is being forced upon the rest of the population. The internet and globalization are going to inject the startup mentality into ordinary jobs. There are degrees of risk taking. Ordinary jobs will have low levels, low doses of risk taking, but it will be there. It is there. It is here.

Looks like the worst part of the bad news of a bad economy might be behind us. You can get gloomy about what just happened. Or you can objectively look at it and see capitalism's creative destructions. What will happen next is way more exciting than what was there before. The jobs, companies and industries of tomorrow stand to be created. This is high time for a mega renewal of the human spirit. I am optimistic. I was throughout the past six months of bad news. All hard economic times of the past decades have also been periods of major innovation, of companies launched that went on to do big, bold things. I don't wish a bad economy upon anyone, but you have to wonder why.

You have to stay hungry also during good times, or success will get the better of you. The trick is to stay hungry during good times. What gets your juices flowing? Do you got fire in your belly?

On The Web

AT&T And Verizon's Start-Up Mentality - Forbes.com
Techcrunch takes on Israeli startup mentality | ISRAELITY
Teaching the Startup Mentality
Startup Mentality
European vs US startup mentality | anders.tyckr.com how often would you say that two of your friends start the same business idea - separately - without them knowing about each other ..... reports keep coming in that the mobile social network market is going to be huge. ..... Europeans do not aim big enough, and on the other hand, US startups go super big with sometimes very crazy ideas. But crazy ideas are only crazy and funny if they are done with bad timing. ...... Going too slow might be a problem, and is probably as hard to fix as going too fast. ..... I would not want to miss a minute of the action to come.

In The News

EBay Unveils Skype IPO Plans BusinessWeek Skype sales surged 44%, to $551 million, last year and the company expects them to top $1 billion in 2011. The user base surged 47%, to 405 million, in 2008. ..... Zennstrom and Friis reportedly offered less than $2 billion for Skype. An IPO could fetch $3 billion to $5 billion ...... Skype could find itself in closer competition with such sites as Facebook or Twitter. ..... "I see [Skype] as a Ferrari that's only firing some of its cylinders."
Plus: Skype in Your Pocket
Google's Trademark Tussle
Business Exchange: Search Advertising
Goldman, Give it All Back
Taxing Grandma to Pay Goldman Sachs
Intel Says PC Demand 'Bottomed'
IBM Roars into Business Consulting
Cuba: How Much, How Fast?
Obama Pitches His Economic Plan
China Faces a Water Crisis
Learning from Recession, the Japanese Way
Nokia: Signs of Stabilization?
Can Widgets Save the Television Industry?
How to Make Acquisitions in a Down Economy
Time to Buy TV, Radio, and Internet Ads?
Put a Human Face on Your Presentations
Today's Tip: Sales Strategy for Tough Economic Times
Getting Ready for the Recovery
Preparing Now to Drive Future Growth
Options for MBAs Without Jobs
Getting to Know Yourself
It's Now a Renter's Market

A Blogger Is Also An Editor

Image via Wikipedia

A blogger is a writer. We all know that. But a blogger is also an editor. I have to make this point because some bloggers feel they are cheating when they have a lot of links and a lot of video clips to go with their blog posts. You are not cheating, you are being an editor. It is perfectly okay to once in a while put out blog posts that are all links, or that are all video clips, no original writing whatsoever. You are telling your readers these are news articles or blog posts I read, these are videos I watched, and I recommend them to you. Actually, I would be suspicious if your blog posts are all original writing. If there are no links, at least a few links, I am going to ask, so what is the context? And images and videos add to the aesthetics. The best videos on the topic at hand I would say are indispensable. A video is worth 10,000 words, or more. YouTube makes it easy. The video code takes so little space. You don't have to worry about bandwidth issues. You embed. That does not make it cheap, that makes it user friendly.

YouTube is an essential tool for blogging. Zemanta is an essential tool.

Blog Daily
Where Have You Placed Your Ads?
Sites That Pay You To Blog

Blog Daily

Image by just.K via Flickr

Blog daily. Take a day or two off per week, but otherwise blog daily. You must have one thing you feel really passionate about. And your blog has to revolve around that passion. But once it does, you are free also to rant about whatever else, whenever. But that one passion has to shine through. And if you were to read about 10 news items on any given day in your passion domain, you will find at least one topic, one subtopic to rant about that day. The more blogs that link to yours, higher goes your ranking, but that is not directly in your control. More often you blog, higher your search engine ranking. That is in your control. Blog daily.

Blog Daily
Where Have You Placed Your Ads?
Sites That Pay You To Blog

Where Have You Placed Your Ads?

Image via Wikipedia

Until yesterday my ads were in the white zone, at the very bottom, and on the side bar in the middle. I had this if-you-build-it-they-will-come attitude. Once I start getting enough page hits, revenue will follow, that was my attitude. But the point is, ad placement works at all page hits levels.

I moved my ads to the orange zone only yesterday evening, and already my earnings have gone up by a factor of four, and I am only half way through the day.

I made two major changes on my three primary blogs yesterday.

For now Nepal and Barackface have the most blog posts, but now my primary blog is Netizen.

I used to have only one blog post per page. Now I have three blog posts per page.
Now I have ads at the bottom of each blog post. That also ends up being ads at the top of two blog posts. So I have one in the orange zone, and two in the red zone now. And that has made a huge difference.

A less cluttered side bar also makes a blog more user friendly. And the footer now only has a search engine. That makes the blogs look cleaner.

And all this was very easy to do. For those of you familiar with the Blogger dashboard, click on "Layout." Then click on "Page Elements." Go to the box called "Blog Posts." Click on "Edit." There you can decide you want three posts per page and that you want to "Show Ads Between Posts." Google only allows for three ads per page, so three posts per page is a good number.

Because I now have three posts per page, now I don't feel the pressure to write particularly long posts. And so yesterday I had the busiest day ever at Netizen measured by the number of posts. So ad placement is not the only reason the earnings today are so much higher.

And yesterday I wrote my first blog post advertisement: Advanced Global Materials. Google makes money from ads, so can I. It is a problem only if all your posts at your blog are blog post ads. But as long as you maintain a healthy ratio between your regular posts, and your ad posts, and you clearly state at the bottom of a post that it is an ad, I think you are okay. (Sites That Pay You To Blog)

Like Deng Xiaoping said, to make money is a good thing.

Twitter Is Not Micro

Image via CrunchBase

Take the links away, and Twitter is not going to be fun no more, at least not for me. And I don't see what's micro about full blown webpages, news articles, blog posts, pictures, video clips. When I envision a tweet, I don't envision 140 stale characters. I envision a few words that point me to a weblink, more likely a tiny URL, that I might have the option to click on. That is not to say I don't enjoy tweets that are all words and no links. I do. But they are in the sea of links. That is why I enjoy them. It takes seconds to skim through an all words tweet, and usually another with a link is right below.

That is not to say I am a link clicking monster blindly clicking the links away. I pick and choose. But then that is why you carefully choose to follow people. Your library of Twitter contacts should be such that whenever you jump into your stream you find at least a few links to click on. I find that every single time. So when I go online, of all the places I could go to, Twitter ends up being the one with the greatest pull. You have to convince yourself it is not distraction, it is education.

Twitter is not micro. Twitter is smart. Can't do without Twitter in this day and age of information overload. Twitter allows for a smart consumption of information. You swim in the Twitter stream for half an hour, maybe 15 minutes, maybe 10, and you feel like you are in the loop, with the world. You know what's going on. You know all the right people. Heck, you follow them. They can't say no.

The tweet is the ultimate equalizer. Some of the fanciest names in tech put out tweets that are not that different from the kind of tweets I put out. I feel level with them much of the time.

After I have a new blog post, I tweet it, I don't submit it to Digg, or any of the similar services. I do use Delicious for bookmarking. But often time I just tweet an interesting link. I know I can track it with one Twitter search down the line. So I use Twitter also for personal bookmarking.

Twitter keeps my blog fresh. I guess there you could argue Twitter is indeed microblogging. But then, is it? My tweets tend to be link rich.

Demi Moore and I joined Twitter the same day. I have 230 followers, she has 520,738 followers. I am guessing she is better looking.

The Depth Of Your Friendships At Twitter
Goal: A Billion People On Twitter
Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Pages

Friday, April 17, 2009

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Wednesday, April 15, 2009