Andy Boyer

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Category: Personal (Page 44 of 48)

Inspiration from an Unlikely Millionaire

June 28, 2007 /

If you had an Internet connection at work in 2000 or 2001, one of your colleagues forwarded you a link to HotorNot.com.  You played with it for somewhere between 5 minutes and 8 hours, helplessly clicking on the neverending stream of pictures of people who wanted you to judge how good looking they were.

About 1% of this crowd probably wondered if the founders were making any money, or if they simply launched the site for fun.  Well it turns out they were making GOBS of money.  Giant trucks were backing up and dumping bars of platinum into their backyard.  In a nutshell, it proved that a simple idea, at the right time, with the right people, was infinitely more powerful, satisfying and worthwile than simply attending weekly staff meetings.

Well, if you read techCrunch you probably already wandered over to this blog post from the CEO of HotorNot. If you have ever considered running off and starting your own idea, here are some wise words to help get you moving in that direction.

Lumosity – Something to Play With

June 14, 2007 /

I will take the leap and say that a small company called Lumosity falls into the world of Marketing.  For, positioned one way, Lumosity would simply be entry #3.2 billion in the category of "Ways to kill time online when you should be productive."

But instead, starting with the tagline of "Reclaim Your Brain" and extending through the core messaging, Lumosity is much more than a nice looking version of any casual games portal.  According to their literature, I will actually get SMARTER by spending time on their site. The multi-layered exercises and puzzles are designed to actively stimulate regions of my brain that have gone neglected, enriching my overall intellectual capabilities. 

So far, I don’t feel smarter, but it has kicked my paranoia level to an all-time high, as I wonder if I am simply a pawn in someone’s giant marketing copywriting experiment.  But, I have succumbed to sucker status, and the exercises are fun, so we’ll see where this gets me. 

Sonics Fans Regain Hope – Here Comes the Calvary, er….Indians

June 7, 2007 /

It’s a story that begs for mixed metaphors, and simply reeks with irony.

The 50+ White Men who owned the Seattle Sonics, millionaires and billionaires from all industries, could not come up with the money to build a new arena for their basketball team.  Nor could they convince the government that the taxpayers should foot the bill.  An so with no solution in sight, they threw up their hands and dumped the team on some Oklahoma businessmen.

More white men.  Even richer and more powerful than the Seattle group.  They came up on private jets and dined in 5 star restaurants, convinced they could not fund their own stadium.  And so, when their negotiations with the same government representatives yielded the same outcome, they threw their hands in the air and said, "We’re going to have to move."

And just when Sonics fans thought it was hopeless, who comes riding in on White Horses, but the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe.  And they said, "You see, well, we got a couple hundred acres of land just sitting around doing nothing, and we have all this cash sitting in the bank, and one day Johnny was driving down the road and said, ‘We should build a basketball arena there.’"

And now the most illogical, unbelievable scenario makes perfect sense.  If a stadium works in Renton, why not Kent?  Why not have an arena next to a casino?  Why not build a rock arena / hoops court that leverages the already existing White River Amphitheatre?

And better yet, why didn’t any of the MBA’s working on this project for the last few years think of it themselves?

Now I’m not totally wild about driving 40 minutes for a basketball game.  And you probably completely lose anyone that lives above Edmonds.  But given all the scenarios, this seems to make pretty good sense, and beats having to start rooting for Portland. 

Who would have thought – the Muckleshoots delivering a solution that neither Seattle or Oklahoma’s business elite could come up with. 

 

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