There’s no question that we are in some ridiculously bad economic times. And when you look at the system as a whole, the problem certainly seems unfixable. Now there is a lot of rhetoric on each side of the political aisle but here are the few humble thoughts from a small business owner.

1) There are actually jobs out there – This may seem like an inflammatory comment to my unemployed readers. But when we spun off our new company, Relaborate, a little while ago, one of the first things we needed was a developer to help us flesh out the prototype. And let me tell you – that developer was really hard to find. You may not want to code. But if you want a job, learn to code. You won’t be the best coder in the world but the economy needs more coders.

2) The Unemployment system is horrendous – I’d like to hire more people to full-time, full benefit roles. However, our clients aren’t always signing 12 month deals. So often that means contract/project work. And too many times, I hear the following positively ridiculous statement: “How long is the gig? I’m not sure I can do any work or get paid for doing project work, because it will mess up my unemployment benefits.” That’s insane. The entitlement system provides incentive to not do part time projects, which could lead to a full time role. The system actually discourages productivity. Sure, someone could argue that I should just give the person a full-time job. But that’s not always an option. If I have a specific time-bounded project that I need someone with a specialized skill set to help me with, I’d like to pay a fair market wage to someone to help me with it. The system shouldn’t be stopping that person from being able to say yes. Someone should be able to fix this.

3) The labor “Supply and Demand” Curve is out of whack – This goes back to the point about developers. The Universities need to do a better job of controlling how many degrees are given out in each field of study. If the country only has jobs for 10,000 Art History majors, the Universities shouldn’t pump out 20,000 new Art History majors a year, paying $40k a year in college tuition. I know it would take a little foresight and research to make these projections, but I kind of assume the Universities should have the collective intellect to pull this off.

4) It takes a little effort – A friend of mine recently offered to help someone with some connections. The job seeker sent a Facebook Wall post asking for those connections. No resume, no personal email, no phone call…just a Facebook Wall post. The entitlement generation needs to figure out a few things about professional behavior.

Now the point of this post is not to be a rant. It’s actually optimistic. Every day I work with people who are hungry to work more. I see entrepreneurs trying to build companies that will enable them to hire people. I see people who are under-employed wanting to work. But I call upon the high schools and universities to push students towards careers where there is demand, I urge the politicians to fix the arcane unemployment rules that make it hard for people to take short-term project work, and I strongly encourage the under-employed to think about what kind of roles people are desperate to hire. I want to be Commissioner of Baseball. But there’s already a line of people more qualified than me for that role, so I’ll have to keep doing these Marketing jobs. It’s just the way it is.

In a lot of ways, we are all our own small businesses, and we are all selling a set of services to someone. We all need to have something that people are willing to pay for.

Clever.  Way to take a potential negative, and use it to your advantage.

Sure, I know we all equate July 4th with a nice 3 day weekend in the middle of the summer.  But I want to take 2 minutes to reflect on exactly what we are celebrating.  Now, I don’t know what really happened 200-300 years ago, but I’ll try to remember what my history teachers told me.  

Sometime in the 1600’s, we were all living in England.  And then some of our friends and neighbors decided they had had enough of religious oppression.  So they hopped on boats like the Mayflower and headed to the new “colonies” in America.  

Eventually, enough of us moved over here that we developed some sort of free market up and down the Eastern seaboard.  And we must have been doing pretty well developing new products, exporting new crops and creating a nice sustainable economy that didn’t require subsidies or loans.  Because the guys back in England said, “You guys are really showing success.  We need to raise taxes on you so we can spread that money around over here.”

Eventually, we got tired of a bunch of professional politicians and lifelong royalty-types telling us what to do.  We were sick of a government that reached out too far, who taxed us too much, and who got involved with things they had no expertise or knowledge about, passing arcane laws that made no sense.

So, as one big group we denounced our relationship with the oppressors.  We announced independence, and developed a loose government in which the colonies – now called states – would govern themselves.  The national government would pretty much be in charge of monitoring interstate commerce and running a national defense made up of all the state militias.  But at the core of the idea, was that we would govern ourselves in a manageable, state by state way.  We’d be responsible for our own welfare, and only rely on the federal government to arbitrate disputes and manage a defense – where if you attacked one of us, you attacked all of us.

Obviously times have changed and we’re in a more complex world now.  But every Independence Day, I like to reflect back and remember what our whole country was based on.  I wonder how many ways we’ve deviated from the original plan, and whether that’s a good or bad thing.

Lazy Friday?  Great video to watch over coffee. Thanks New Yorker.

Mindrelic – Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

This is not meant to be a definitive review of iPhone Photo Apps.  I’m not anywhere near qualified for that kind of analysis.  But, I’ve downloaded quite a few, and here are a few I use pretty regularly to post photos up to my TumbleBlog at AndyBoyer.Tumblr.com.

Also, I’m going to assume you already have tried, or regularly use Instagram and Hipstamatic.  

Photosynth

1) Photosynth: It’s not the easiest tool to use super effectively, and tends to be pretty buggy, but when it works it’s a pretty cool way to take a panoramic shot.  Great for the top of moutnains, stadiums, or places where you just want to capture a 30,000 foot of your surroundings. The issue is that it is hard to line up the string of photos in a way that creates the perfect stitch.  But, I’m sure with a little more diligence, you can pull it off better than I do.  (Also, make sure you are standing next to someone who isn’t going to move around a lot and get their head in the shot.)

2) Diptic: Easy way to quickly stitch a few photos together into one “frame.”  Do the edits right on your phone, and choose from about 10-20 layout options.  Then, upload that picture to your Facebook pge or what not.

3) Comic Touch Lite: Fun little free version of an app that simply ads comic bubbles to the pic.  Nothing revolutionary here, but super simple to use and fun at bbq’s and such.

4) Camera Plus: I like playing with this, and I think it provides slightly better photos.  Not 100% sold though.  (No example)

5) 100 Cameras in One: Basically it’s Hipstamiatic with a different style interface.  Take pics, run them through a filter, see the result.

Things I’m playing with and haven’t decided upon yet.  (ie, saving them for a future blog post.)

 PicPlz, SlowShutter, ToonPaint, MillColour, Phototreats, Retro Camera, Labelbox, LiveFX

Also:

I’ve already written about publishing tools like Zapd and Color, so I left them out of this post.

Let me know if you have any photo editing tools that you are using every day.

I’ve said it every May since 2007 – judging the Investment Round of the UW Business Plan Competition is one of my favorite days of the year.  It’s exciting to absorb the energy and inspiration from all of these young entrepreneurs and idea generators.  Sure, most of the 38 “companies” on display won’t ever go past this day, but everyone who takes part surely takes something they learned, something they discovered, or an idea they came up with into future companies.

Enough hyperbole – Let’s talk about what I saw.

Now, the problem for me every year is that there are always these awesome engineering and medical companies that I just don’t get.  A UW med student will tell me something like, “When you combine this UW technology with this UW technology, you get a compound that completely eliminates both cancer and male pattern baldness, AND adds 4 inches to your vertical leap. We would just need 4 years and $50 million to make it work.” And since I don’t understand anything about biology, I would invest in them.  Or, they’ll show me a prototype of a jet pack or invisibility cloak.  The idea sounds cool and reasonable, and I say, “I want one of those.”  Only later do I learn why the technology is impossible.

So this year – and I apologize to the science guys – but I really only visited the companies that I thought I would really understand well enough to ask hard questions of.  And without commenting on who I through my investment “dollars” at, here are some of the ideas I liked and people I liked talking to.

1) Seattleite Magazine – I’ll mention them first, only because I met founder Jane Yuan a few months back and saw an early version of their business plan.  There could be a market for this kind of online pub in Seattle.  It’s a fun read, with lots of good pics of Seattle people and places.

2) Breadcrumb – The reverse of FourSquare, Breadcrumb notifies a person’s emergency contacts in the event that they DON’T check in when expected, dramatically improving search and rescue efforts for missing or injured people.  Perfect for hikers, campers, mountain climbers, fisherman, etc… whose parents worry about them.

3) Online Pay Station – I really root for these guys.  Think old school market meets unlimited product options. This is a company for African residents – enabling people without bank accounts or credit cards make online orders via companies like Amazon.com.  They pay Online Pay Station (OPS) cash at an OPS Internet Cafe, OPS makes a bulk buy to save on shipping, receives the order, then warehouses the merchandise until the buyer picks it up.  

4) PotaVida – Did you know that you can put dirty water in a plastic bottle, stick it in the sun, and then the sun will kill all the really nasty, dangerous organisms in the water in 6 hours or so?  I didn’t.  The problem is, you don’t *really* know when the water is clean.  PotaVida makes a little LED based contraption that tells you when the water is safe.  Go to a disaster relief location, put 100 bottles on a roof at once, but a PotaVida device on one of them, and suddenly you know when the water is safe to hand out.

5) Punchkeeper – Take all of the loyalty cards that you have to carry around, and put them in one app on your mobile phone.  Snap a pic of a QR code to get credit.  That simple.

6) Sky Fu – They call it “Self Defense for the Social Web.”  I summarize it as Radian6 for small businesses who need to monitor Yelp, Trip Advisor and the like.  

7) Pterofin – Designs and manufactures innovative wind energy devices for residential and commercial use.  I don’t get why it works better than regular turbine, but they say it does, so why not beleive them.

8) TripBox – Makes travel planning easier.  Cool demo.  Hard to describe. Maybe Widget based travel planning.

9) Digital Menu – Almost makes too much sense to work.  Rather than spending money printing out paper based menus every day, restaurants just go to this site, pick from the templates, update the menu, and Digital Menu turns it into a mobile or tablet based menu that can be shared online, across social channels, and that you can even view at the restaurant.

10) Soothie Suckers –  Kids don’t want to take herbal medicine.  So the solution – put it in a popsicle.  That’s the theory here.  For what it is worth, the popsicle tastes good.

There were a lot more great companies on display – 28 more in fact.  But that would make the blog 100 pages long.  Here’s the list of the companies that made the next round.  But congrats to everyone who made it from the initial 100+ down to this final 38.