While you might be interested in a ego vanity iPhone app like the Brad Feld iPhone app, you are probably a lot more interested in an iPhone app for your business. NewsGator has become an expert at building these and has developed a superb framework for branded iPhone apps.
On March 31st they are having a Webinar titled Gain Revenue & Readership with Branded iPhone Apps – Reed Business Case Study Webinar. Walker Fenton from NewsGator and Brien Tate (Reed Business’ CTO) will walk through what they’ve done around the Variety iPhone app including:
NewsGator has learned a huge amount about building, deploying, monetizing, and publicizing iPhone apps. Attend the webinar to find out more for yourself.
I love living in Boulder. But, I travel a lot. And I like that also, especially when Amy comes with me. I’m in Boston today for TechStars for a Day and then doing a bunch of stuff at MIT tomorrow. Amy came with me and is doing her own thing at Wellesley.
I often get asked how much time I spend on the road versus at home. I decided to track it – along with several other things (miles run, books read, and airplane flights) for 2009. Following is where I have slept so far this year as of 3/10/09.
Boulder is obviously the big winner so far, but expect a lot more nights in Seattle, San Fran, LA, and Boston. And probably a few in Chicago and New York. I’m using Daytum to track this – it’s intensely cool. I just wish it knew how to import data.
I have always wanted a jetpack. From one of my favorite West Wing exchanges (among many) in "The West Wing: The Warfare of Genghis Khan (#5.13)" (2004):
Leo McGarry: My generation never got the future it was promised… Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don’t even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped.
Josh Lyman: The personal computer…
Leo McGarry: A more efficient delivery system for gossip and pornography? Where’s my jet pack, my colonies on the Moon?
Our infamous friend the jetpack is explored in today’s WSJ in an article titled The Jetpack: An Idea Whose Time Has Never Come, but Won’t Go Away. Buried down deep in the article is the insight that the FAA does not regulate jetpacks since, according to FAA spokesman Les Dorr “Thirty seconds is not sufficient to be considered a flight.”
My good friend Bruce Wyman pointed out to me that – according to Wikipedia – “The first flight, by Orville, of 120 feet (36.5 m) in 12 seconds, at a speed of only 6.8 mph over the ground, was recorded in a famous photograph.” How ironic – I guess the FAA wouldn’t consider the first flight to be the first flight.
And – just to show that US inventors don’t have a non-monopoly on jetpacks, @tonybain pointed me to an article on a jetpack being invented in New Zealand by Glenn Martin. Jetpack innovation apparently knows no geographic bounds, but per Leo McGarry, has been a long time coming.
“There is a category of people that do stuff and a category of people that stuff gets done to.” The following short video is from the end of the event I did a few weeks in Seattle that was summarized nicely by Xconomy Seattle in Greg Huang’s post VC Model Is Not Broken: Insights from Brad Feld of TechStars and Foundry Group.
Brad Feld – cofounder of Tech Stars – "Do Stuff!" from Seattle20 on Vimeo.
Entrepreneurs are in the category that do stuff. Get up every morning and do stuff.
I love numbers. I was thinking about numbers and dates on my run yesterday. Here’s a few fun ones for you.
101010 – On 10/10/2010 the answer the life, the universe, and everything will be revealed.
030309 – Isn’t it fun to have square root day be “prime square root day”? How many of them are there in the 21st century? How about 02/02/04, 03/03/09, 05/05/25, 07/07/49. That would be five. So there are a prime number of prime square root days.
090909 – Number 9, Number 9, Number 9 is the day that the Beatles version of Rock Band is released. As a special bonus it’s the second day of my Q3 off the grid vacation.
Got any other good ones for me?
I’m going to be at SXSW from 3/17 to 3/19. At 1pm on 3/17 at Mezzanine 1 at the Austin Convention Center I’ll be giving a talk titled What’s Next For Venture Capital Investing and Entrepreneurship in the US. It’s being hosted by CanadaConnects, a partnership of the Canadian Interactive Alliance, the Department of Canadian Heritage, and the Consulate General of Canada. If you are interested in attending, drop Michael Mendoza an email.
I don’t have a deep agenda at SXSW – I’m just going to wander in, take in the sites, check out some things I’m interested in, and have a few great meals. So – if you are there and want to connect, just send me a note on twitter between 3/17 and 3/19 and I’ll try to meet up with you somewhere.
As I was going through my morning information routine, I noticed a number of articles that I’d put in the “how to not fail” bucket. I read a few of these and noticed a consistent tone of “failure is bad – here’s how to avoid it.”
Throughout my life and career I’ve failed at many things, large and small. I view failure as a fundamental part of every entrepreneurial endeavor, whether it’s a failed project, hire, partnership, relationship, lead, customer, or even the entire business. One of the great things about entrepreneurship in America is that failure is an accepted part of the cycle.
I used to say something like “one of the great things about America is that failure is acceptable.” When great people fail, they acknowledge it, learn from it, get up, dust themselves off, and get back at it. If you accept reality, you can fail gracefully and hopefully learn something from it. It’s never fun – and it can be really stressful / painful / emotionally hard – but it’s a part of learning, evolving, and growing stronger and better.
While I fail at stuff regularly, I’ll never forget the deepest cycle of failure I’ve been in to date. As the Internet bubble popped exploded, company after company that I was an investor in failed. As I grappled with this, I felt like I had been run over by a truck. After I got up, a steamroller came and flattened me. As I was peeling myself off the ground, the steamroller backed up and smushed me again. Then, I realized I was lying on top of a hole and the top fell in and I tumbled down to the bottom. As I was looking up at the sky, some jerk came into view, poured gasoline onto me, and then dropped a flaming stick on top of me. By the summer of 2001, I realized that ever day had been worse than the previous day. I no longer got up in the morning and said “ok – today will be better than yesterday”; instead I resolved myself that every day would be worse, until it eventually got better. Then 9/11 happened.
I hung in there, kept getting up every day and doing my best, working hard to make informed and intelligent decisions, and helping all of the companies I was an investor in however I could. A few more failed, but a nice number survived and ultimately thrived. Things eventually got better. And I learned a lot.
In my world view, the best leaders understand that failure is an integral part of things. The cliche “fail fast” is one of my favorites. When things aren’t working, deal with it. Another is the famous line from Atlas Shrugged “Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.” Denying that failure is part of our existence is akin to faking reality.
While I accept “the experience of failure” feels “negative / crappy / depressing / hard / sucky”, I don’t believe that “failure is bad.” Deal with it, learn from it, pick yourself up, and try again.
I’ve watched (and participated) with excitement as Rally Software has helped move the notion of agile software development into the mainstream over the past few years. In addition to having the leading Agile application lifecycle management solutions, they are tireless educators and evangelizers for all things Agile. Today, over 1500 companies are doing over 33,000 projects using Rally’s SaaS-based ALM software.
Rally has just announced their Agile Success Tours. The first one is in Denver on 3/18/09 followed by similar events in LA on 3/26/09 and New York City on 4/02/09. They are free, but you have to register for them.
Each event is a half-day and is aimed at software and IT executives and managers who are being asked to deliver software faster and with fewer defects. The event will focus on how development teams can adopt Agile practices to achieve the real and measurable results that today’s economic climate demands: faster time-to-market, improved productivity, and fewer defects.
In addition, Rally has recently launched an Agile Blog that is packed with information, advice, and suggestions about Agile and how to implement it in your organization.
If you aren’t familiar with Rally or Agile, take a quick look at their five minute overview or try out the free version of Rally’s Community Edition for up to 10 users. Come join the Agile movement.
I had a call this morning with a CEO of a young company I’m on the board of. They are well funded so they have plenty of urgency, but no panic, around what they are doing. During the conversation, he asked what he could do to increase the board member’s visibility of the progress they are making.
I told him to start sending out “daily data”. There is a lot of data flowing through their system and there are several different dimensions of growth that are easy to measure. Rather than hand collecting stuff, I encouraged him to automate all of this right now, while the company is young. It can be web-based data (which I’d just toss in my daily information routine) or better yet emailed to me so it shows up with other reports like this in my daily folder.
Many of the companies I’m involved in do this. A lot of them provide the data weekly, although I always prefer to get it daily as I feel more engaged and can synthesize the trends better. I also notice the step function changes a lot better when I’m seeing the data stream by on a daily basis.
An example of what I’m talking about is the Lijit Stats Robot. Every day I get an email from the Lijit Stats Robot that includes the following daily data:
Another example would be the data I see every day from Gyminee
Obviously both of these data sets are trending data sets so I see the trend rollup monthly, but by getting to see the daily data a quick glance can often generate an interesting insight. It also causes me to spend at least ten seconds thinking about the company each day, which probably serves the CEO well as it increases the likelihood that I’ll notice something else throughout the day that might be helpful to him.