Today I noticed that Yahoo abruptly changed color themes on their beta Yahoo Mail interface. They also rolled out some pretty interesting contextual advertising technology that I’ve never seen in an email client before. They actually detect the names of cities and places in your incoming emails and underline them. If you hold your mouse over the word, it displays a little contextual menu with options to view travel information, maps, and search results.
I could see this being pretty useful if it was integrated with the right services. For example, if I could click on an address and automatically have cheap hotels, airfare, and rental cars suggested to me, I would be be pretty thrilled. Looking forward to seeing where this is going. It’s interesting to see Yahoo’s “Peanut Butter Manifesto” strategy play out.
There’s an awesome post on Guy Kawasaki’s blog about financial projections. Glenn Kelman, founder of online Real Estate pioneer Redfin.com, shares real life numbers from his business and projections. Really good info for anyone running a start up.
I like to think that every entrepreneur is in it because they love to do what their doing. Personally, I love the process of creating something from nothing. I really really love creating value where there was none before and all the challenges that come with that.
Part of what I think makes people successful is being able to identify personal weaknesses and delegate those to people who can do it much better. For example, every person I hire is smarter than me. No doubt about it. I mean, honestly, why would I hire them if they weren’t smarter than me in some way?
As I’m preparing to raise our next round of funding for Blue Lava Technologies, I’ve stumbled across a personal weakness. I _hate_ accounting. I mean, I really really hate creating balance, income, and cashflow statements. Don’t get me wrong, I love the data. That’s some of the most important data any entrepreneur has to make good decision and be sure that the business is running well. I just hate putting it all together, which is the job I’ve been tasked with for the last two weeks.
It’s made me really appreciate how much I love everything else I do. It’s also made me realize that I need to hire a CFO to handle this for me in the future. So if you know anyone, let me know.
Oh yeah, we’re also looking for a really good COO and Project Manager.
To those of you who know me in the real world you might have noticed that I’ve gone into hyper stress mode. I’m actually not that much fun to be around these days. My apologies. We’re about to raise our next round of funding and the perfectionist in me wants to make sure that everything is, well, perfect.
I was doing some research and came across some pretty crazy stats from InfoTrends. In 2006, a cumulative total of about 330 billion images were saved on a worldwide basis. This number is expected to jump to about 880 billion by 2010. On average, U.S. digital camera owners currently have about 1,000 images saved and this number grows larger every day. By 2010, there will be about a trillion images saved on hard disks, optical media, and other storage devices.
Sharing these photos and finding specific photos out of all these images is becoming a daunting, if not impossible task.
Bo Burnham is a 17 year old gansta rappa from Massachusetts. He’s got some of the funniest YouTube videos I have ever seen. I bet he’s got an amazing future ahead of him.
My friend Jeff Taylor, founder of Eons.com, just pointed me to his MySpace page where he’s got some awesome mixes that he’s made. He also built a _badass_ and absolutely huge dome at Burning Man this year called The Roots Society. This man knows how to party. Check out a video I took inside his, um, “tent.”
AT&T just came up with a fantastic way of keeping customer satisfaction levels at an all time high: fire the customers that complain about your service. This is hilarious stuff. I’m sure it’s “corporate policy” and all that jazz, but funny nonetheless.
