Technically Speaking

Naked in Minnesota or the rather sexy term I came up with in my head for being without my laptop for the next 72 hours! I used this cool site and calculated it to be Four Hundred and Thirty Five days I have not been totally disconnected – or rather – my laptop has been accessible inside of 12-24 hours time.

That is how long I’ve been doing this Lookery thing. If you want to count my other start up adventure pre-Lookery, the good ol’ LC blog, we can up that number to Four Hundred and Ninety Seven days. If we want to go back further to like when I started this blog, etc – but we won’t. I think you the reader understands the point I’m trying to make.

Now I have been out of town during that time, and on vacation (a few times), and gone away for weekends. But I have always had access to my laptop before I left and after I arrived home from wherever I roamed. This time, all I have is my iPhone 3G for internet connectivity.

The reason I am not taking my laptop is I’m going to this place called – New Ulm, MN for my niece’s wedding on Saturday the 27th. I checked AT&T’s coverage map, and this place doesn’t have 3G. So much for waiting to buy the 3G version of the iPhone – back to Edge access! Not to mention my 3G WAN card will be useless!

To round up the no laptop coming with me and going naked – I have about 10 hours of driving over the weekend. The fact that a plane ticket to Minneapolis, MN is like stupid pricing really ticks me off. I can usually fly anywhere for cheap. Not Minneapolis! The drive from the STL is like 10 hours, and in order to cut some time off that, will be flying to Omaha, NE first and than driving another 5 hours. Hey, 1/2 of a 10 hour drive is better than doing that long drive through Iowa and back again another 10 hours on Sunday!

Technically Speaking: Right now I feel like it’s really Friday; even though in reality it’s only Thursday – but since I work for a start up – days of the week really have no meaning! Oh, and sure – technically speaking – I can access pretty much everything via my iPhone 3G – but I think for the next 72 hours – I may just surf the net on it, and play with the apps I have on there – and of course take the occasional phone call or SMS.

This was quite interesting seeing, the scramble to get the MySpace Music post up first.

But as we all know, MySpace Music launches tonight at 9pm pacific time!

If you are out of work and looking for a job, Digg apparently has them now with their new Series C round of funding that is close to $30 million.

That’s almost three times as much as Digg has raised so far, in two previous rounds of financing. Why so much?

My guess is to hire more people, pay for the new space in San Francisco, and other assorted things that Digg needs in order to be successful at what they do. What do they actually do or rather what is their product?

Technically Speaking, just felt like posting.

Congratulations are in order for Matt Marshall and VentureBeat for being recognized for content worthy enough to be syndicated in the New York Times. Along with GigaOm and RWW as well, congrats! This proves that old media is a dying breed, hanging on to what readership is left. Taking over the perceived mainstream media will not be an easy task.

Along with blogs being syndicated to mainstream media, we have places that offer video content by the buckets now. Why do we need a mainstream news show that only comes on at 5pm or 10pm at night anymore? We don’t. News, entertainment, and good writing is all available sans mainstream media. It’s about the people dictating to the media, and no longer the reverse. This is what democracy is about.

The change today only signals a small battle being won. More like a concession by the mainstream that bloggers are doing it better. Blogs like VentureBeat now employ writers that are even better than what the mainstream offers. While many may disagree with me on that last statement, I can speak from personal experience – Matt Marshall knows the news and reporting.

Technically Speaking, my very short run at VB last year was only the tip of the iceberg for both of us, and I like seeing how that moment in time led us both in directions that worked out for the best.

Where major publications such as the NY Times get their tag line ideas?

Well it’s apparent to me that someone must read this blog, or must be a mind reader. Pretty blatant if you ask me where his tag line came from. I don’t think too many people say “Dumb It Down” very often. Sure he replaced my “it” with “us“, but the intent is the same.

That’s fine, and I can’t wait until someone else writes about my theory of snowglobes and Akmehd. It’s quite ok, as I have always been use to being on the bleeding edge and leading vs following. My blog here has a bunch of ideas that a decent writer could expand upon and re-write. The interesting thing that I find is how my biggest article here is still the most searched item and read blog post here.

It was a total fluke that I even wrote that article. As shown clearly here on my network page which shows my empirical Lookery audience analytic data – people keep coming here to read about that one person. Again, that day was quite interesting as I never intended it to be more than a passing mention that morning.

Technically Speaking, while this blog will never be the most read blog online, I don’t mind contributing to the real writers out there in a send up type of way. We all know where to come when you want the real deal before it’s mainstream.

twittermoms as profiled by TechCrunch earlier this afternoon has been with Lookery for about a week now. Already they have some pretty nice demographic data.

As I noted in my comment, this is only some of what you can see for FREE. That is empirical audience analytic data!

So the question for you people out there reading this – How come you haven’t signed up your site for Lookery? OH you run a Wordpress blog? Well we took care of that for you also with a WP Plugin for Lookery!

Technically Speaking, we don’t bite, and we go down as easy as Google Analytics. When you sign up you have the full access to your data as outlined here, so what are you waiting for?

Dumb it down

That was a term that an old band of mine used. What we meant by that is, sure any bunch of musicians with a bit of talent could write the next 6-9 minute “Metallica‘isque” opus, but here is the question that you need to ask yourself – “Why?!?”. Is it to satisfy your ego? Is it to impress your fans? Trust me, your fans don’t care.

The general listener (the fan) of music doesn’t care if you wrote a 3:30 hit song or if you wrote the 6 minute song with massive amounts of changes, breakdowns, and segues. Fans do not care. Even the 70% of the crowd that are other bands who are your competition and watching, they do not care. About 1% of the audience gives a hoot that it took days to complete the song. Only 1% of the audience will ever care about the 90% it took to write the 6-9 minute song.

How does that apply to the startup world or to technology in general?

Well case in point. Companies that are successful have a pretty simple idea and concept. Twitter is a great example. Simple idea. Simple concept. When they started out, they had no idea beyond a communication tool. Make sure it worked, and see if we can get some people to use it. Everything else came later.

Of course they had no idea it was going to take off in the massive fashion that it did. But at least they were able to dumb it down enough to be useful and simple. Great concept and great introduction to a world that only 1% cares how it works, what the API does, etc.

Play to your main audience and not the 5 nerds in your basement playing D&D with odd shaped dice. That’s the ticket and the point of “dumb it down“. Technology is impressive only when you make it apparent to your audience what you are doing. Leave the 5 nerds in your basement because they are the 1% that you can address at a later time.

What is this snowglobe thing?

I just logged into my Facebook account a few moments ago, and I was already thinking about posting the above, and saw Yan tweet something about TSA taking a snowglobe from some old man at the airport. I saw the same thing happen a few weeks back in Denver!

TSA – Here is a note for you - Akmehd ain’t going to be carrying a snowglobe! Trust me. Hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings is so 2001. It’s not going to happen again. Akmehd and his group of terrorists are not that stupid.

Further more, why is it every time we all talk about terrorists, we instantly call them “Akmehd” or some other racially profiled Arab name? Don’t you find that a little disturbing that we call every terrorist “Akmehd” or something similar. Makes you think how warped the news media is, driving that thought deep into our head.

“Arabs are bad” “Akmehd is a suspect” “Terrorists will fly planes into buildings again” – Crazy stuff! But it’s the truth, we already racially profile thanks to the mainstream media. Seriously – Bill, the terrorist is not going to make a snowglobe bomb.

For those of you that haven’t caught the new HBO series – “True Blood” – you really need to watch it. It’s a well written show that shows just how racist we really are. Kind of tongue in cheek, but if you have watched, you know where I came up with the last line above about “Bill, the terrorist“.

Technically Speaking, that felt good!

Everything pretty much sucks online these days. It’s the same garbage recycled 25 times over and I still get PR stuff from all sorts of places and people. I know, not one of the big dog blogs, but yes, people still beg me to write about the product that has already been done but done better.

Finally today, someone that actually matters or rather something that matters contacted me. The company is a startup out of San Diego (my #1 favorite city) and is called Collarfree. They are currently running a contest that taps into what does really matter in the next few months – the 2008 general election for the President of the United States.

The contest they are running is called “Keep Politics Positive” which is an oxymoron, but I hope that people realize the days of dirt slinging politics is old news. No one is interested in that anymore. I think it’s great that a t-shirt startup came up with a positive spin on the election.

The contest format is simple. Graphic designers from around the world submit stylish, pro-candidate t-shirt designs into Collar Free’s voting system on a daily basis. The public votes on their favorite shirts for either Obama or McCain. The shirts are then ranked and displayed based on their win percentage, calculated by totaling the positive votes for each design.

This is a leading a trend among online communities called “Crowd Sourcing,” which is the concept of bringing together a large group of people to create a product. Collar Free posts competitions for designers from around the world and allows the public and consumers to select the products they love most. This innovative design process increases demand, reduces risk, and engages customers, in part because shoppers and designers find it fun.

This company is based out of San Diego, CA and was founded in April 2008 by Jimmy Hendricks and Patrick Dillon.

Technically Speaking, I’m so glad that there are startups that are actually doing worthwhile cool stuff still out there. I wish these guys luck and hopefully they can leverage past the 2008 election and have a successful run.