Category Archives: Entrepreneurism

Shelfari

Posted by Andy Boyer in Entrepreneurism, Marketing, Media

Shelfari is a new company I ran across recently. It looks like an interesting way to monetize your blog or web site in a visually appealing way.

The wizard is a little hard to find, but once you track it down, it’s wickedly easy to use. I use Squarespace for this web site because I have little to no code skill whatsoever, and it took about 4 seconds to insert the Shelfari Bookshelf on the page.

Of course, I need to register as an Amazon Associate to make the money part of it. It doesn’t seem clear whether I can do that through Shelfari or not. That would be ideal, but it’s not a headache they need to take on. I’m sure the Amazon signup process is easy as well.

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Carena MD

Posted by Andy Boyer in Entrepreneurism, Marketing

I stopped by the University of Washington CIE Program’s "Springboard" event last night.  42 interesting companies were out looking for MBA and undergraduate help in Marketing and other Business skills.  It was a well attended and well organized event, which is no surprise considering it was run by Connie Bourassa-Shaw and her team at the CIE.  if you are a small business, you should seek them out.  They really are doing great things over there.

One of the companies is run by Ralph Derrickson, and stood out for being so simply ingenious without being a tech firm.  Carena MD brings doctors to corporations.  You get your checkup, physical, any consult on site, rather than taking time out of your day to travel to your family practitioner.  It’s one of those ideas that you can’t believe hasn’t been part of daily life for years.  Anyway, find  out more from their website at www.CarenaMD.com.

Cool Web Site – Geni.com

Posted by Andy Boyer in Entrepreneurism, Marketing
I’m not going to regurgitate stuff I see on TechCrunch every day.  But here’s a site the non-TechCrunch crowd can get behind.
 

At first Geni.com seems like a neat Web 2.0 application, and that’s it.  Great, we make a family tree.  We’ve seen that before.

But this truly has some awe inspiring potential when you consider its viral nature.   I can start building a little mini-tree.  I may not know it, but my brother in law may be building one as well. As soon as I connect myself to him by entering his email, I suddenly get hooked up to his work in progress.  Take this out horizontally about 6 generations, and you suddenly have a global project for mapping an entire generation.

Sure, there are limitations because none of our grandparents are going to hop on and create the same type of network effect.  But the next generation, and so on and so on….

Now think of an overlay of MySpace, Friendster,  or Facebook.  Include Google Maps.  You start to see potential to link everything and everyone together.  I’d be surprised if this doesn’t turn into a Google property at some point.  We have all this info on everyone, we just never connected anyone with anything stronger than a MySpace friend list.  Using the familytree as a way to connect people and information will have powerful implications in the future.