Category Archives: Recommended Links

Recommended Links

Big Picture, Innovation and Ideas

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Big Picture: It is always interesting to me to see how founders think about their companies. Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, writes this annual report. And while we are on the subject of Google, Jim Spanfeller, CEO of Forbes.com, wrote a scathing indictment of Google and their role in the demise of the publishing business.  A much more fun read is the response by Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand in a point-counterpoint post.

Innovation: Scott Adams of Dilbert fame talks about information flow using a time based methodology.  He envisions a world where our calendars will become much more intelligent, personal and useful.  I like this vision of the future.

Ideas: If you have never seen Seth Godin speak, you now have the opportunity to view this talk on Tribes from the 2009 TED Conference. And for a little historical Seth, here is his riff on Purple Cows from 2003.

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Economy, Behind the Scenes and Entrepreneurship

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Economy: James Surowiecki, writing in the New Yorker notes that for the first time in many years, the size of the financial industry has declined.  What does this mean for us?

Behind the Scenes: Nicholas Felton makes me feel like a voyeur.  But I just can’t help myself.  He writes and designs an awesome annual report of his life every year (2008, 2o07).  Now he has made the software available for others to journal their life and chart what is important to them at Daytum.com.  Interesting…  Don’t think I am going to start charting myself, but I like the end result a lot.

Entrepreneurship: April Lane, Associate Director of the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center at DePaul University wrote a good article today on the habits that owners of service companies need to practice to achieve success.  I might have mentioned one or two of them before, but it never hurts to have a reminder.

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Big Picture x2, Entrepreneurship and Chicago

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Big Picture: As I get older, I find that the “rules” that I once were taught are not hard and fast anymore. In fact, some of the ideas about demographics have changed significantly even since the beginning of this century. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars has an engaging study of world demographics that puts some of those old rules to the test.

Big Picture: Sometimes it is hard to comprehend the meanings of million, billion and trillion.  Terence Tao has taken the US Federal Budget and rescaled it to the approximate scale of the average family in the US.  This helps to understand how much money is being spent on which items.

Entrepreneurship: Jim Stoynoff has written a good blog post on the ways that small businesses can work better with bankers.  A lot of it is common sense, but communication ranks high on this list.

Chicago: Woo Hoo! Fast Company has named Chicago its U.S. City of the Year.

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Big Picture, New Inventions and Behavior

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Big Picture: Malcolm Gladwell writes in The New Yorker about how David can beat Goliath. In many cases, it is thinking outside the box and not falling to conventional wisdom.

New Inventions: From the pages of Harry Potter, along comes an invention that we can all see merit in (or not) – the cloak of invisibility.

Behavior: Have you ever wanted to understand how a con-man was able to work his magic?  Read a lesson in How to Cheat from The Economist.

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Entrepreneurship and Fun

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A little bit of a light day today due to other commitments. Tomorrow will be more of the same.

Entrepreneurship: Wow, two articles on start-ups versus corporate America. First,  SAMBA Blog posits that “It takes a lot more work to build a small company than it takes to build a big company.”  Read their rationale.  By the way, I agree with them.  Second, Micah talks about the differences between start-ups and corporations relative to failure.

Fun: Did you ever want to see President Obama’s Facebook status for the first 100 days?  Somehow, Slate got an unauthorized look and shares it.

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Big Picture, Economy and Fun

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Big Picture: Imagine that your financial records were being held by your financial planner (and if you had more than one, each in a separate system) that you were not allowed to view.  You trusted your financial planners, but if you asked questions of them, they would reply “Now, who is the financial planner here?”.  If you ever did get to see your records and noticed an error, you could not find anyone who was responsible for fixing it.  Doesn’t sound like my financial planner, thank god.  But change the subject to your relationship with your physician and you aren’t so surprised anymore.  Well, you may be surprised about how your medical records are actually kept.  In his excellent blog, e-Patient Dave talks about his adventures in Electronic Medical Records and what we can do to make things better.  Attention, open source software folks, we may need your help soon.

Economy: What is your take on these 12 iconic brands that 24/7 Wall Street believes will disappear in the next 12 months?

Fun: I thought I knew how to make a baby, but as usual, I didn’t have all the steps down right, at least according to this video.

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Entreprenurship, Behind the Scenes, Behavior/Magic and Economics

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Entrepreneurship: Gina Trapani discusses all kinds of neat tools, applications and vendors that can help a new business get started.

Behind the Scenes: Robert Scoble takes us inside of Zappos.com and how they can create a corporate environment that keeps their employees excited and their customers enthralled by their service.

Behavior: An article on neuroscience probably would not have caught my eye, but bring Penn and Teller into the conversation and I am hooked.  This article talks about how magicians utilize flaws in our perception to amaze us.  I viewed the balls and cups clip 3 times and still I didn’t catch everything.

Business Economics: The US Postal Service is one of those organizations that we take for granted.  6 days a week, we will have a red, white and blue truck drive up and deliver our mail, most of it “junk mail” or what the USPS calls standard mail.  What we don’t think about often is how fiscally responsible they are, what are their unfunded pension liabilities and how they make money in the age of the Internet.  This article sheds some light on how the USPS operates and offers some suggestions to make the service more effective.

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Networks, Video and Entrepreneurship

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Networks: Kevin Kelly wrote a book called New Rules for a New Economy in 1998. He has reprinted them as a series of blog posts and they are more relevant today than when they were first published.  A recent post talks about the mathematics of networks.  Don’t be scared.  The math is not difficult but the results are critical to our understanding of social networking.

Video: If you ever get the chance to see Seth Godin in person, do so.  If you can’t find the opportunity or want to see what I mean, check out this video from 3 years ago.

Entrepreneurship: Raman Chadha, from DePaul’s Coleman Center for Entrepreneurship writes a great article on venture funding.  I have long had the same kind of thoughts on entrepreneurship and whether angel or venture funding is right for even a small percentage of start-up ventures.

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Tools, Behind the Scenes and Entrepreneurship

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Tools: Zamzar.com is an online file conversion tool. It will take almost any kind of document, spreadsheet, presentation, text file, compressed file, audio file or video file and convert it to another format.  One of the neat new tricks is to convert a document into an audio file.  It is not a professional reading the file, but it is serviceable.

Behind the Scenes: Another in a series of posts that discuss the creation of something that you take for granted from a behind the scenes viewpoint.  Today’s topic: Magazine Subscriptions.

Entrepreneurship: Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich is a polarizing guy.  Some people love him, others… not so much.  Today, he talks with leading venture capitalists about what they look for in new business pitches.  For all of you entrepreneurs looking for capital out there, this is required reading.

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Economy, Entrepreneurship and the Government

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Economy: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of  The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable writes today on the Financial Times about 10 things that would help us to grow beyond our current economic crisis (and prevent another).

Entrepreneurship: Paul Graham writes about an interesting way to get entrepreneurship jump started in the US: change immigration law.

Government: Here are some factoids that I learned by looking at this chart:
The FBI costs half as much as the FAA.
We spent almost twice as much for Mine Resistant Vehicles as we did to fund the entire National Science Foundation.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense costs 11 times more than to run the Office of the President.

What did you find that was wacky?