Category: Personal (Page 46 of 47)

I’m not sure why I’m so late to the game on Prosper.com, a web site designed so that people who need loans can receive funds from ordinary people who are looking to make a return on their reserve cash.

The concept is pretty simple, people with money become parts of "mutual fund-like" loans to individuals who can’t or don’t want to go through a bank.  There is research that people are more likely to repay loans when they know there is a human behind it, and they know who those humans are. The lenders get good returns – 10-25% and their money is spread among a bunch of different loans so the risks are mitigated.   

My initial thought was that there is an issue where people who need the loans may not have the broadband or even Internet connection to take part, but that’s probably a subtle qualifying factor.  If you can’t find a broadband internet connection these days, I probably don’t want to loan money to you.   

From the Seattle Times:

Summarized: John Cornwell graduated from Duke University last year, and built a refrigerator that can toss a can of beer to his couch with the click of a remote control.  It took about 150 hours and $400 in parts to modify a mini-fridge common to many college dorm rooms into the beer-tossing machine, which can launch 10 cans of beer from its magazine before needing a reload. With a click of the remote, fashioned from a car’s keyless entry device, a small elevator inside the refrigerator lifts a beer can through a hole and loads it into the fridge’s catapult arm. A second click fires the device, tossing the beer up to 20 feet — "far enough to get to the couch," he said. In developing his beer catapult, Cornwell said he dented a few walls and came close to accidentally throwing a can through his television. He’s since fine-tuned the machine to land a beer where he usually sits at home, on what he called "a right-angle couch system."  For now, the machine throws only cans, although Cornwell has thought about making a version that can throw a bottle. The most beer he has run through the machine was at a party, when he launched a couple of 24-can cases.  A video featuring the device is a hit on the Internet, where more than 600,000 people have watched it at metacafe.com, earning Cornwell more than $3,000 from the Web site.

I love it.  Guy builds a totally usueless contraption.  Films himself using it.  Posts it online – makes $3k for his troubles.  Also, talk about something that doesn’t make any sense – a guy too lazy to walk 10 feet for about 15 seconds of travel time, spends the equivalent of a week building a solution to the problem.  And they say American ingenuity is dead…

Update:  He also has his own Web site: www.beerlauncher.com  

Last Friday in Dallas, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell shared a stage, and Jobs blasted the teachers unions.  (How many politicians wish they could have said the same thing?)

Jobs lambasted teacher unions, claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers."I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way," Jobs said. 

"This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy." At various pauses, the audience applauded enthusiastically. Dell sat quietly with his hands folded in his lap.

It’s refreshing to see a businessperson stand up and say what many people think.   A good friend of mine is a teacher, and has this to say about his own union.  "They’re ridiculous.  You can’t claim, ‘alll teachers are good so none of us should be fired’ and in the next breath say, ‘we are paid too little to attract talented teachers.’  Which one is it?  Are we good or bad? Because we can’t be great and crappy at the same time." 

I love teachers.  I think the work they do is admirable.  But let’s face it, if you can’t evaluate and eliminate underperformers, no amount of money can fix a problem.  Guaranteed employment and a paycheck based on seniority, not merit, is a sure way to encourage mediocrity.  Teachers unions will hopefully take this to heart and in the next levy for increased wages, I hope there is some sort of control for grading the graders, rewarding the strongest ones, and pushing out those who can’t pass the eval.

I’m not terribly well versed in political marketing, but my sense is that My.BarackObama.com is the first social networking site developed by a Presidential candidate of import.

It’s not hard to understand why connecting freinds of Obama together through chat rooms and message boards would be a powerful thing.  But it will be interesting to see if the web site allows free form of ideas, or moderates posts it finds unconstructive.  For example, if two Obama supporters debate opposite sides of an Obama platform, will we all see the debate, or will it be stricken?  If sections of the Message Boards are over run by Hillary supporters, what is the protocol?

Every candidate who runs a site faces these political attacks on blog comments, and it’s never been a big deal to just keep them from beng published.  But a social network is designed around the free form of ideas and thoughts, which is counter intuitive to edits and review.  I’m interested to see the editorial decisions that get made.  

I stumbled across PicNik today and here’s a place I could end up wasting a lot of time. It immediately went into my favorite links at the right.

It’s probably an insult to call them this, but it’s essentially Photoshop for Dummies, and I mean that in a great way.  Photoshop can be a pain for simpletons like me who just want to manipulate an image in some really easy way.  PicNik probably isn’t the only photo imaging site out there, but if you need to make some tweaks to anything in your photo library, give it a whirl.

The U.S. beat Mexico in a friendly tonight 2-0.  It’s an otherwise unremarkable event for a Wednesday night.

Except the George and Dragon Pub in Fremont was packed to the gills.  Univ of Phoenix Stadium in Arizona had 63,000 people – I’d say mixed pretty half and half US/Mexico fans.  And the game was on ESPN 2, not relegated to Fox Soccer or some other channel up north of Channel 400.  Again, all of this for a friendly.

So when a bunch of smart tech guys sit in a bar with hundreds of people watching an inconsequential soccer match, the conversation always comes up – How do you make a pro soccer league work here? 

I’ve purposely not commented on the Beckham signing.  There are people who get paid lots of money to run financial analyses that say that was a good idea.  There’s no mystery there.  You can’t round up 250 Million smackers from smart, global marketers with a pitch of, "I have this idea…"

So a few people on different Web sites have thrown out interesting concepts about what will make soccer work here.  This post will be continued for years, as more and more good thoughts get fleshed out.  So here are some things I’ve heard from the man on the street:

1) Investment from NBA and MLB players – Kobe Bryant and Alex Rodriguez are soccer fans.  It’s easy to presume many others are as well.  MLS, Division 1 and Division 2 teams are well within their capabilities for financial investment.  Kobe Bryant’s Inner City Soccer Organization would bring crossover kids from basketball to soccer.  It’s arbitrage for them.  Buy a part of a team cheap, make the sport more popular, team increases in value.

2)  More regionalization –  The EPL works because every team can be reached by train.  The European Professional League would not work.  No one in Newcastle cares about  Marseilles or Hamburg.  The U.S. is just too big. MLS doesn’t need New York vs Salt Lake.  It needs Salt Lake vs LA 1,  LA 2, LA 3, LA 4, Denver, Seattle, San Fran, Oakland, San Jose, etc…You need separate regional leagues that come together in a more Champions League-like way every so often. It’s not a national TV show, it’s a regional one.

3) Become the preferred place for South American players – US Pro Soccer should not ever compete with the EPL and Serie A.  It needs to feed them.  But not with kids who play US college soccer.  We need to bring up the best young South Americans, train them in 1st class facilities, and feed them to Europe.

4)  More overlap with Mexican League – The short-term wins are with Hispanic speaking US residents and other international imports.  Continue to build the rivalries between teams like Chivas and Real Salt Lake.

5) Radical idea: Blow up the NCAA soccer programs – I heard this from a drunk.  But there’s no need for college soccer.  Loses money for the University and dilutes the talent pool.  Get the top players into these regional leagues.  They can still go to school, but not play for the school. 

6) A week of EPL games in East Coast Cities every year – It’s a fairly short flight.  Why not set a week in the EPL schedule where you put togther all the crappy non-rivalries, and ship the games to the U.S?  Try a few Spurs vs Bolton or Newcastle vs Fulham games in New York one year and just see what happens. 

Good soccer in the U.S. will happen eventually.  EPL-like soccer in the U.S. won’t.  The continuing question is how do we replicate the 63,000 fans at a friendly into some sort of consistent soccer crowd?

These days, I’m fortunate enough to work with a ton of great creative agencies. Turnstyle Studios, Don’t Blink Media, Angelvision, and PanBuilt are four that immediately come to the top of my mind. 

It’s a world with more start-ups, where more companies (and the VC’s that fund them) are demanding more work for less money from a talented team that isn’t part of the "big agency" experience.  In a world of thousands of agencies, the question is, how does one small agency stand out?

Well, the answer is to create compelling materials that market yourself.  And that doesn’t mean one-sheeters and direct mail pieces anymore. 

Brisbane Creative launched a funny site last week called Useless Account, in which they mock start-ups around the globe.  I found it through TechCrunch, and it’s likely Brisbane sent a link to Michael Arrington.  From a revenue perspective, they gain nothing.  In fact, the server capacity may even be an expense. 

But now you know who they are.  When you are in a meeting, you may say something like, "We need an agency as creative as Brisbane."  This is a long post to say that this we’re all trying to figure out what the "new" forms of marketing will be in the net 5 years.  But the creative agencies really should be the ones driving that.  They’ll come up with genius guerilla tactics, we’ll notice them, hire them, and we’ll want the same type of genius when we start cutting them checks.

Update: Turns out Brisbane Creative is actually a University student in Australia named Jim Whimpey.  His blog details the story of Useless Account, and pretty much makes everything I said, well useless.  He wasn’t trying to create buzz for his agency in the way I imagined, but it certainly worked out that way. 

This story is about a week old now, but the disappearance of computer scientist Jim Gray sparked a remarkable social collaboration led by Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. TechCrunch details the story here, so I don’t want to rob them of their deserved readers.

But the side commentary concerns the power a globally connected network can have.  It’s unlikely we’ll be able to find Mr. Gray, even with everyone looking at 5-10 satellite photos.  But this kind of application can be taken national for missing chlildren, or down to the neighborhood level for lost dogs. Using this technology, it’s really not hard to forsee us using our 5-10 minutes of goof off time to work on a complex problem with 100,000 other people.

But on this project, we hope someone finds something of note in the photographs, and Mr. Gray can be found. 

Well, it had to happen someday.  Sure HTML and Flash had gotten pretty easy.  But us Marketing folks still didn’t have a way of producing really slick multimedia shows without the help of someone creative.

Part of the design hurdle may have been cleared with Camtasia Studio from Tech Smith. I could try to explain it in a lot of words, but the keyword is "Screencast."  If you need to explain what your Web site does, or how to use anything online, or even just record a visual list of all the gifts you want someone to buy you, this piece of software does the trick. 

Best thing to do is check out an example on Screeniac.com and click on any of her links for "Flash Demo."  She may be doing free Screencasts on products she likes as a way to market herself to companies she wants to do some work for (which would be quite ingenious).  Or she may be getting paid to do the screencasts.  Either way, look for bloggers to start using this kind of visual/audio mix as a way to bring their news to life.