Evite's most annoying feature... did you and your friends take photos of the event yesterday? Post them here.
Do you know anyone that keeps their photos on Evite? Seriously, anyone?
It would be so much easier if they just integrated with all the existing photo platforms and allowed anyone, no matter what platform they keep photos on, to show photos to the group. They should be the photo aggregator for events... because, believe it or not, not everyone uses Flickr or has friends on Facebook.
This is one of the many things Evite strikes out with, but this particular one just really gnaws away at me.
Six years ago today
What to say, except that I'm pretty sure this is the first year that we didn't get that same perfectly blue sky we had that day. It's raining here. Seriously, if there's anything that stood out to me about September 11th, it was how amazingly blue and clear the sky in NYC was.
And let's see... we're mired in a war we can't seem to get out of, Ground Zero is still a whole in the ground, 9/11 workers are sick, Bin Laden looks better than he did a few years ago and our immigration policy now seems to keep the people we actually want to come here out, and we still have no idea who's even here.
I dunno, but I hope that by the time the 10th anniversary comes around, we have a little more to show for what happened...
Calling all Boston-area college career counselors
Alex and I are heading up to Boston on Friday to meet up with some angel/VC types and want to spend the morning meeting with some college career planning offices. If anyone has good contacts, particularly with schools like Boston College and Boston University, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could drop me a line--especially if you know them well because you've worked directly with them, spoke at one of their events, etc.
links for 2007-09-10
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“It’s actually served us pretty well,” says Haro. “If you think about 3D games from seven years ago they look pretty terrible. And the kids who play this game don’t even know what the word ‘retro’ means. It’s just another look to them.”
My Helio Ocean breaks and I just ordered a Sprint Mogul... thus endeth the Helio experiment
Recently, I've been pretty frustrated because the Helio Ocean Exchange wouldn't sync my calendar and that the contacts wouldn't actually sync the phone's firmware contacts. Therefore, I could look you up in my Exchange contact list, click to call you, but then if you call back, the phone would have no idea who you are. The calendar issue was a bug on their part that caused the phone to just completely crash when I tried to sync my calendar. The guess from Helio was that it was due to old calendar entries... seems like that's a hell of a bug just to be caused my some old entries.
Well, today, we had a new bug:
Did you spot it? Look closely. Yeah, um, the magic triangle spring is supposed to prevent the keyboard and the numeric keypad from opening at the same time. I opened the keyboard today and something went ping on the inside. The top slider came loose and not only was I able to open both sides of it, but this is as closed as I can get it now. So, I basically have an open Swiss Army Knife for a phone.
I went over to the Helio store expecting to get a replacement, because I'm paying the insurance. Nope. First, the guy tells me that he doesn't know if this is a warranty item or a claim because, he'd "never seen that happen on any of the phones before", implying that I broke it. I told him I didn't much care if he had seen this before or not... fact of the matter is that it broke and I was insured. All he could do was to direct me to a phone and gave me the customer service number. They implied it was a claim (not a defect) and so they gave me the insurance company's number. They were going to take 24 hours to process the claim and then get me a phone in 3 business says standard shipping... i.e. 4 days without a useable phone (It doesn't dial out anymore and the menu buttons are all screwed up b/c it doesn't know which way it's oriented). Of course, I could pay another $15 in addition to my $50 deductible to get it next day. Knowing that there was a good chance I was bailing on Helio anyway because of the Exchange issues, I passed on the $65.
Here's the interesting financial outcome of this whole thing, though. Dave Evans pointed me out to the Sprint SERO plan (Google it), which was a hidden discount program for employee referrals. The problem was, I couldn't take advantage of it when my prior Sprint phone got stolen because it was only for new customers. Now, since I left, I'm a new customer again.
So, in the end, even if I eat my way out of my Helio contract, here's the final financial impact assessment:
PPC-6700 stolen... No immediate financial impact because that phone was purchased as part of USV due diligence on a mobile app company... moved back to old Palm Treo... hated it.
6/13 - Bought new Treo and accessories... ($274)
3 months of Helio service (@$85) vs. 3 months of old Sprint service (@$116) = +$93
Early termination fee.... ($175)
Cost of Sprint Mogal... ($300)
So, basically, the new phone overall cost me $656...
...BUT...
Monthly savings on Sprint SERO plan vs comparable full cost Sprint service +$40/month.
So, before the end of my 2 year contract is up, the phone will have paid for itself.
Not too shabby... Can't wait for my Mogul!
I also can't wait for Ken Berger to tell me he told me so.... however, leaving Sprint and coming back did allow me to take advantage of this lower cost plan, so, in the end, it was totally worth it.
links for 2007-09-08
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Create a public Internet identity. I strongly recommend blogging, but even a homepage will do. Have a genuine all-accessible identity online that you're cool with grandma and your boss reading. Don't make it uber drab, but do provide context for who you a
Majoring in Entrepreneurship? Can Entrepreneurship even be taught?
Fordham is starting an entrepreneurship program for its undergrad students and I'll be teaching a course entitled "Innovation and the Entrepreneurial Mindset". Yesterday, those of us who teach in the program were talking with the dean about whether or not the program should be a major or concentration, a specialization, a minor, etc.
The difference is whether or not it should be something focused on by itself or in conjunction with other majors, like finance or marketing.
I've always leaned towards identifying yourself with some fundamental business skills set, like finance, accounting, marketing, info systems, etc., and then layering on specializations, like entrepreneurship or international study. To me, international marketing, marketing in mainstream media or advertising, or marketing for a startup are three pretty different types of marketing--all of whom require the fundamental principals of marketing, but differ in their application. Now, whether those are specializations, double majors, etc. I don't think it matters.
Also, you have to think about fallback, too. What if someone does the entrepreneurship program, but can't nail that business idea or decides that getting some industry experience and connection in the area of their startup idea would be valuable--working for DKNY before you decide to start your own fashion label, perhaps. Would anyone want to hire you if you were only an entrepreneurship major and didn't at least have marketing, finance, or accounting?
There are business programs that have full majors in entrepreneurship, like Babson. In fact, I met a Babson entreprenuership major last night at the CooBric opening and he thought it was a valuable experience.
Of course, this question of where it fits in a program presupposes that you can even teach entrepreneurship in the first place... and to be honest, while I might not have thought so a few years ago, the more I get involved in this program, the more I think you can. It's not so much teaching as it is introduction. When I grew up, starting your own business was seen as kind of a flakey thing to do. My mom worked in a school and my dad was a fireman before he went into accounting (yeah, I never understood that transition either). I never knew about the startup world, and when I learned about it, I thought it was just all about having the big idea one day--like a lightning strike.
In my own experience, I think what is more likely to happen is that the big idea is slow cooked after being involved in a space or a line of thinking over time. I got the idea for Path 101 after seven years of various mentoring and intership programs. I wasn't trying to be an entrepreneur and the best ideas probably come when you're not trying to be one.
So, what am I going to teach? I'm going to teach immersion and opportunity identification. I'm going to teach these kids what it means to actually get waist deep in something like I am... that it's not just getting a job... it's about real active participation in the industry, in the community, whatever it is. And, once you're in the thick of it, learning how to identify power structures, pain points, etc.
These are lessons that are useful whether or not they'll ever become entrepreneurs, because it's not enough to just clock in and clock out anymore. There are so many more opportunities to really get active in a space and the people that take advantage of those opportunities are often the ones that wind up innovating and changing those spaces.
What do you think? What does an entrepreneurial education look like to you? How does it fit with other skills and courses? Did anyone take any entrepreneurship courses in school?
links for 2007-09-05
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This is pretty friggin cool... and its an idea that I threw around with an entrepreneur at USV like two years ago.
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Lindsay Lohan reads my blog, too!
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Toby and Brooke are my fav couple friends... Perhaps Mere and I should do something like this.
5 Things I'd like to see in Dopplr
So Dopplr got funded and so I feel inclined to spend a little more time thinking about what I'd really like it to do, because it's a great concept.
- Events: Show me, in a structured way, why people are going where they're going. If everyone I know is planning on going to SXSW, tell me, and tell me where everyone who plans to attend SXSW is coming from. People have been trying to nail the relevant events thing for a while and if Dopplr could tell me what out of town conferences people were planning on attending, that would be a great dataset to show everyone--particularly the conference providers themselves. Who's coming for Day One, Day Two, or who's just in the area for other stuff
- Let the people drive the dates. I'm thinking about trips to Boston, Providence, and Toronto in the next month or so, but I'm kind of up in the air about it. Dopplr forces a date on me. Why can't I just say, "Sometime in the next month" and see if other people are planning on going at any time within that. Seeing that kind of data might help me narrow down my trip.
- Show me strangers... like, on every page. When you first join Dopplr, the user interface just doesn't show a heck of a lot of people. It feels like an empty place. I should be able to see who is coming to NYC in the next week, even if I don't know them.
- Combine with other profiles. I'm glad to see Reid Hoffman investing in this, and hopefully, when the LinkedIn API comes out, Dopplr will be one of its first developers. I'd like to see the LinkedIn profiles of people who are coming to NY and at the same time, the Dopplr intentions of everyone in my LinkedIn network.
- Dopplr Autopost: Before you build a widget that most of my RSS hungry audience is never going to see or use, allow autoposting of Dopplr updates to my blog (and yes, my Facebook). When I add a possible trip to Boston, even if I know the dates, I want a post on my blog to automatically appear that says, "I'm thinking about going to Boston soon... find out what dates and subscribe to my updates via my Dopplr feed."
Dopplr to me: Add to me! Add to me! Sigh.
I'll prob be doing a fair bit of traveling for the rest of the year. Toby suggested I join Dopplr, which I did.
And then I sat there and stared at it.
Here's an app desperately in need of a "Find your Gmail friends on Dopplr" tool. It wanted me to add trips, so I added one. Nothing happened. I thought I might find some people going up to Boston on weekend of the 15th. Nope... nothing.
So, um... what's the point?
Don't apps need, um... like, magic or sex or something? Shouldn't you show something to the user to hook them? Keep them engaged?
Perhaps I don't know enough Web2Heads that go to all the same confereces as everyone else.
