I can't tell you how ironic it was when someone create secretcabal on Twitter. Ironic because there was one. Some time ago the good folks at Noro-Moseley Partners had invited me to a dinner meeting at White Space Gallery. The purpose of the dinner was an open discussion of what's happening in the Atlanta startup community. There was a request not to mention it online, which I respected. As did everyone else. Intriguing.So last night the entire Noro team assembled along with about 16 people from the tech community. We broke out via dinner tables and Mike Elliott and…
Selected by lance
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Force of Good
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Secret Cabal
9 Feb 2010 | 6:44 am -
Advisor Advice
8 Feb 2010 | 5:48 amI was recently copied on an email exchange that took place between an entrepreneur and an investor.It was brought to my attention that you have included my name and bio in your company materials as an advisor to your company. Both you and I know that I am not advisor to your company. We spoke at (event redacted) some months ago and that is the extent of it. Please immediately cease and desist from using my name and remove it from your business materials. Thanks. (name of angel investor redacted).The probability of this firm ever raising an angel round just took a serious hit. At the very… -
Taking My Own Advice
6 Feb 2010 | 5:35 amI am killing the ATDC marketing circle and Internet circle. These were small monthly gatherings of startup types that were interested in either topic. I will continue to support Brandy Nagel who spearheaded the marketing circle effort. If anyone wants to engage with me about either subject hit the BookNow button in the right side bar and make yourself an appointment.Update: The marketing circle lives on. Brandy has moved the event to Friday mornings from 8:30 - 10:30. You can register here. -
Instant Karma
6 Feb 2010 | 5:04 amWhat in the world you thinking of Laughing in the face of love What on earth you tryin' to do It's up to you, yeah you John Lennon Given the comment level and unique visitors at FoG the posts of the last two days have hit a nerve. And it is amazing what people conjecture and say.Lance can't maintain his brand. Lance is being all controversial on his blog to drive traffic to better sell sponsorships. Lance please do get to know the value each event and it’s associated organization has to local startup execution and learn which events are startup-related and which are not. -
Your Pitch Sucks
5 Feb 2010 | 4:07 amIt's 6:28 am. I have not had coffee, and my wife is out of town so I am taking care of my 10 and 11 year olds. But I am going to pop something out real quick like here.Yesterday I wrote a little piece about the inordinate amount of technology startup events in Atlanta and how a little thoughtful coordination might be of help. Despite the fact the majority of actual practicing entrepreneurs appeared to agree with my assessment I was called harmful and ignorant. I can assure you I am neither and the subject seems to be good for both conversation and traffic so I thought I would…
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Mashable!
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5 Ways Airlines and Hotels Can Drive Revenue with Social Media
9 Feb 2010 | 12:18 pmShashank Nigam is the CEO of SimpliFlying.com, an award-winning blog on airline branding. He tweets at @simpliflying.Social media is no longer the “new” thing, especially for airlines. JetBlue has over one an a half million followers on Twitter. Lufthansa allows passengers to update their Twitter or Facebook status about where they are in the sky. AirAsia drives buzz about its new destinations through custom micro-sites. However, most airlines (and airports and hotels) are still struggling to earn direct revenue from their social media efforts.Yet if Dell can make $6.5 million from… -
Google Buzz: The Official Demo [VIDEO]
9 Feb 2010 | 11:08 amGoogle has just unveiled its latest attempt to become more relevant in the social media space: Google Buzz. The product is integrated within Gmail and will be rolled out gradually to all of the webmail service’s users over the next few days.We’re still digesting all of the implications of Buzz (and will have more coverage throughout the day), but in the meantime, here’s the two-minute demo of the product in action both on the Web and via mobile that Google showed off during today’s press conference:This video from Google looks specifically at the mobile features of Buzz:What are your… -
BREAKING: Google Goes Social with Google Buzz
9 Feb 2010 | 10:21 amIt’s official: Google has just announced Google Buzz, its newest push into the social media foray. This confirms earlier reports of Gmail integrating a social status feature.On stage revealing the new product was Bradley Horowitz, Google’s vice president for product management. While introducing the product, Mr. Horowitz focused on the human penchant for sharing experiences and the social media phenomenon of wanting to share it in real time. These two key themes were core philosophies behind Google Buzz.“It’s becoming harder and harder to find signal in the… -
Facebook Kills Lexicon, Focuses on Analytics for Page Admins
9 Feb 2010 | 10:20 amFacebook has removed its Lexicon analytics app, blogger Steve Rubel noticed last night.Don’t know what Lexicon was? That’s OK, a lot of people didn’t; it was announced very quietly, but it was a neat tool. You could use Lexicon to see how frequently, and when, certain terms were trending in status updates, just like you can use Google Trends to do the same with search terms.For example, our own Stan Schroeder was a bit perplexed a couple years back when the word “sex” had a massive spike in usage on May 30, 2008. It was the launch day of the Sex and the City… -
7 Ways to Promote Your Offline Event Using Social Media
9 Feb 2010 | 10:10 amSusan Payton is the President of Egg Marketing & Public Relations, an internet marketing firm. She blogs at The Marketing Eggspert Blog, and teaches marketing courses at Marketing EggSchool. Follow her on Twitter @eggmarketing.We all know about Tweetups and online events, but what about events that you didn’t specifically invite the Twitterati to attend? Conferences, meetings and parties are all events that might not have started online, but which can definitely benefit from online promotion and mention.Leverage your offline event with some smart social media marketing. Here are…
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ReadWriteWeb
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Can Google Buzz Succeed Where FriendFeed Couldn't?
9 Feb 2010 | 12:20 pmGoogle just launched Google Buzz, the company's new social networking service which will be tightly integrated with Gmail. There can be little doubt that Google Buzz looks a lot like FriendFeed, the social aggregation service that was acquired by Facebook in August 2009. Today, FriendFeed's developers are Facebook employees and aren't likely to continue to improve the service in any meaningful way, while the active user community on FriendFeed continues to shrink rapidly. Given the similarities between the two services, we can't help but wonder if Google Buzz will be able to succeed where… -
How Google Buzz is Disruptive: Open Data Standards
9 Feb 2010 | 11:31 amGoogle rolled out a social stream service today called Buzz. It looks on the surface like Facebook, FriendFeed and other stream reading and writing services. It will compete with Facebook and Twitter. Under the covers, though, this major product was built by a team of people taking a radical new approach to online publishing: Buzz is all about open, standardized user data. Google Buzz data can be syndicated out to other services using the standard data formats called Atom, Activity Streams, MediaRSS and PubSubHubbub. That couldn't be more different from Facebook. Google has taken open data… -
Mobile Health: Will Network Applications Help Us Get Healthy?
9 Feb 2010 | 11:30 amLast week, we were at the mHealth initiative conference in Washington D.C. The keynotes were all about the impact mobile health applications are having in shaping the future of the health care system. Nothing demonstrates that more than the iPhone. In the 18 months since it was released, it has been perhaps the biggest thing to happen to health care electronic records, which has seen billions of dollars worth of investment in past decades. Mobile and wireless health applications directly impact the individual's health and have the promise of ensuring that when a patient leaves a doctor visit,… -
Foursquare Partners with Zagat, New York Times
9 Feb 2010 | 11:17 amFoursquare has come out strong in recent weeks with partnership deals that look to put it at the top of the location-based app game. Last week, it announced a partnership with Bravo, the style and fashion-centric television network, and today it has come out with a partnership with Zagat, the restaurant guide, and the New York Times. As we wrote last week, Foursquare is competing in an increasingly crowded space. These partnerships may help it attract a whole new audience and remain competitive against other services like Yelp that are just joining in the location-based arena. Sponsor… -
Live Blogging from Google: Launch of Google Buzz
9 Feb 2010 | 11:11 amThis morning, Google is announcing some exciting new features for two of its most popular applications. Team Red, as we affectionately call ourselves, is present at the Googleplex in Mountain View, and we'll be live blogging the event, giving you, dear reader, a fascinating play-by-play. Stay tuned for updates! The event will begin at 10 a.m. Pacific (UTC -8). Just refresh this post to see new content as events unfold. Additional on-the-fly research and images from RWW journalist Frederic Lardinois. Sponsor 11:11: The event is over! Time to chase people down and ask some more pointed…
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HarvardBusiness.org
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The New Economics of Business (Or, the Case For Going Great-to-Good)
9 Feb 2010 | 12:17 pmIt's like a neon sign blaring: "EXIT." A gigantic global economic meltdown, possibly leading to a second Great Depression, should illustrate with finality: business as usual is no longer the road to riches. That's the small answer to the question many of you asked after reading the Great to Good Manifesto: "Wow, cool — but how come going from great to good is, well, profitable?" Here's the big one. The real-world case for going great-to-good isn't just compelling. For more and more organizations, it's simply irresistible. Why? The new economics of business. Hypercompetition — and… -
The Non-Deal Between Japan Airlines and Delta
9 Feb 2010 | 10:38 amJapan Airlines has chosen to stay hitched to American Airlines and not bolt to Delta. In a way, Delta may still come out a winner. Though the details are not yet out, Delta's courting may well have forced American and its Oneworld allies to pay upwards of $1.4 billion just to hold on to their existing partner in Japan. Neither American nor Delta is flush with cash. To see them fall over each other to partner with a bankrupt Japanese airline speaks volumes about the importance of business partnerships in airlines and many other industries. Delta knew that it could both strengthen its hand and… -
What We All Lost When Business Lost Respect
9 Feb 2010 | 9:46 amI want to explore the growing malaise around business, in particular in widely-held, publicly traded corporations. I believe we have migrated — quite by accident — to a set of conditions such that in order to operate their corporations, senior executives are pressured toward a form of existence that is substantially inauthentic. And in the course of leading inauthentic business lives, they lose their moral compasses and play games that make them feel ever more inauthentic. This will take several posts, so bear with me while I lay out the first tranche of the argument. At our core,… -
How Working at a Nonprofit is Like Working at the NFL
9 Feb 2010 | 9:45 amThe last of the celebratory confetti has been cleared from the stands in Sun Life Stadium in Miami. But watching the game brought to my mind some interesting parallels between working at nonprofit organizations and working in the NFL — probably because I've experienced both. (Sadly, I didn't play. I worked in the physically safer confines of the front office.) A sense of mission is critical. The nonprofit world is driven by purpose and mission. People see and seize on opportunities to create positive changes that are bigger than themselves. In this year's Super Bowl, many fans —… -
One More Look at Layoffs During the Great Recession
9 Feb 2010 | 9:19 amHere's a brief update on some research we've been doing on layoff practices. For a decade we tracked who was likely to be fired in Europe during an economic downturn. Surprisingly, it was not generally the least productive managers. Over 40% of European managers said they would layoff an older manager even if that manager was a high performer. Twenty eight percent said they would fire younger workers even if they were cheaper or better performers than others. Less than a third of the Europeans surveyed since 1999 said they would fire the employee we called the "weak link," the older,…
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GigaOM
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Google Launches a Serious Case of Facebook Envy
9 Feb 2010 | 12:10 pmGoogle Buzz and the services it supports at launch I was totally on board with Google Buzz, the company’s late entry into the modern-day social web launching today, until it became dramatically evident how freaked out Google is by Facebook. Despite multiple questions from journalists at today’s press briefing at Google’s HQ in Mountain View, Calif., today about the elephant in the room, the buzz product team and executives couldn’t manage a single utterance of the word “Facebook.” Such silence has two implications: One, it speaks to defensive and reactive… -
Startup Nasuni Targets Primary Storage in the Cloud
9 Feb 2010 | 11:15 amCloud storage startup Nasuni entered public beta today, bringing with it a new, but familiar, approach to storing primary data. Instead of competing in the already overpopulated cloud storage-provider market — where offerings generally target backup operations and simple file storage — the Natick, Mass.-based startup sells software that looks and acts like a traditional file system but stores data in cloud offerings from Amazon, Rackspace, Nirvanix and Iron Mountain. For $250 a month plus capacity fees (Nasuni covers data transfer costs), customers can use Nasuni to house their… -
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Location
9 Feb 2010 | 10:38 amIt’s clear that location is an opportunity ready for its time, but making technology smarter by knowing where we are needs to happen as part of a platform, not be an end unto itself. That’s why I found — and I think many entrepreneurs, developers and investors will find — Phil Hendrix’s new report for GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d) particularly useful. There’s a lot going on here and it’s helpful to get all the pieces in one place. “Location: The Epicenter of Mobile Innovation in 2010” is immr founder Hendrix’ 56-page primer on the… -
TweepML Shows Risks of a Twitter-based Startup
9 Feb 2010 | 10:01 amIt sounded like a great idea when TweepML launched last September: an easy way to manage lists of Twitter users, including sharing them with others, allowing anyone to follow all the users on the list with a single click. Unfortunately, it was such a good idea that Twitter launched something almost identical a month or so later, and TweepML founder Marcelo Calbucci has now put the company up for sale on the Flippa auction site. You can put in a bid for the company, or you can buy it right now for $79,000 and get all the code, accumulated data and any associated domains. Calbucci, who started… -
10 Questions for Greentech Investor David Gelbaum
9 Feb 2010 | 9:22 amThe famously private investor David Gelbaum, founder of The Quercus Trust, and who by his own estimates has between 40 and 50 cleantech investments, as a rule hasn’t done interviews for years. According to the last comprehensive story on him, published in the LA Times in 2004, the former math whiz, hedge fund manager and philanthropist, is so anonymous he’s sometimes mistaken for his gardener. But this afternoon, on the heels of Gelbaum accepting the role of CEO of one of his portfolio companies Entech Solar (the first time he’s taken over as CEO), Gelbaum got on the phone…
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Holy Kaw!
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13 geeky Valentine’s Day gifts
9 Feb 2010 | 12:33 pmLooking for a way to knock the argyle socks off your geeky lover this Valentine’s Day? Skip the computer programmer-themed porn and try gifting your nerdy loved one some HTTPanties or “Tweet Me” Sweethearts candy. The Huffington Post tracked down thirteen geeky gifts that scream “I love you, nerd face.” Full geeky gift list at Huffington Post. Get your geek on. Permalink | Leave a comment » -
Google Buzz's official demo [video]
9 Feb 2010 | 11:25 amGoogle has just unveiled its latest attempt to become more relevant in the social media space—Google Buzz. The product is integrated within Gmail and will be rolled out gradually to all of the webmail service’s users over the next few days. While this development is still unfolding, you can check out Google Buzz’s two-minute demo of Buzz in action both online and via mobile. What are your initial reactions? Another soon-to-be-forgotten Google product like Wave, or a Facebook/Twitter killer? Full story at Mashable. Total Google coverage. Permalink | Leave a… -
Darth Vader’s original wimpy voice [video]
9 Feb 2010 | 11:15 amImagine a galaxy far, far away where Darth Vader sounded like any other British bloke strolling down the corridors of the Death Star. Before James Earl Jones provided the menacing voice of the Dark Lord of the Sith, English actor and bodybuilder David Prowse delivered the lines from inside the Darth costume. While George Lucas never intended for Prowse’s voice to make the flick’s final cut, it’s weird to imagine how different Star Wars would have been with a different Vader voice. Full story at Huffington Post. Tons of Star Wars tidbits. Permalink | Leave a… -
7 things you didn’t know about condoms
9 Feb 2010 | 10:14 amRubbers. Raincoats. Inconvenient. Whatever you call 'em, condoms remain a must-have in the safe sex tool box. Long before the days of Durex and Trojans, men used animal intestines to protect their willies (that sounds lovely, eh ladies?) and still to this day use lambskin condoms for latex allergies and supposed extra sensitivity. Want to learn even more fun facts about condoms that will surely impress your friends and potential lovers? Check out Asylum's seven things you probably didn't know about condoms that includes tantalizing tidbits like: Vaseline + condoms = Disintegrated rubber and… -
Horror flick mirror scare mash-up [video]
9 Feb 2010 | 9:25 amHorror movies love to rely on cliches to scare the bejeezus out of us, but does it really surprise anyone that the axe murderer is going to pop in the reflection of a mirror? Ok, yes, it still totally sparks a few pee-in-pants moments. Check out this mash-up of mirror scare moments (fair warning: don’t watch alone in a big, dark, scary house): Full story at Four Four. Boo! Tons of scary and not so scary movie news. Permalink | Leave a comment »
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The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
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iPad pre-orders overwhelm Norwegian stores
9 Feb 2010 | 12:15 pmFiled under: Hardware, iPadWho's got low expectations for the iPad? Not the Norwegians, as one local store can't keep up with pre-orders. Late last week, retailer Eplehuset (Apple House) suspended pre-orders all together when they sold out. A message posted to their site states that those who have already placed orders will have their spot in line reserved, while others are out of luck. "We have chosen not to receive more pre-orders for now," the site says via Google Translate, "we will contact you as soon as we know anything more." Additionally, iPod1 reports that retailer Humac has… -
SD card reader for iPhone might help bridge the photo gap
9 Feb 2010 | 11:35 amFiled under: Macworld, Accessories, Hardware, iPhone It's cool that Apple is getting all cozy with SD cards for the iPad; it helps to sell the idea that the iPad is closer to a MacBook than an iPhone. As useful as an SD card reader is for the iPad, there is one minor hiccup: it probably won't work with the iPhone. ZoomMediaPlus aims to fill that gap with the ZoomIt SD card reader/application for the iPhone. The ZoomIt is a dongle that plugs in to the iPhone's dock connector and (with the use of Zoom's app) allows you to view and share content stored on an SD card. According to ZoomMediaPlus,… -
Answers for the 'rents about the iPad
9 Feb 2010 | 11:00 amFiled under: AppleSo my folks were here this weekend, and as you'd expect my Dad is really curious about the upcoming iPad, or as he likes to put it "his new 3G iPad". I convinced him that he should wait for April so he could get the new postpaid-data-ready iPad, which he could use anywhere, not just with WiFi hotspots. As we were talking, I began to realize that he didn't really have a clear idea of exactly what this gadget is -- and lots of you probably have parents in similar situations. So I put together this Q&A using actual questions my Dad asked throughout the course of the… -
SDK devsugar: Re-signing applications
9 Feb 2010 | 10:00 amFiled under: AppleTUAW's devsugar series helps introduce developers to tools and tricks that they might not yet be familiar with. Today's tip centers on signing already-compiled and already-signed applications with a new custom signature. A while back, I posted about a way to sign already-compiled applications with your personal credentials in order to better allow developer-to-developer distribution. By re-signing an application, it allows you to install it on any of the devices you have registered to your account at Apple without having to go through the fuss and bother of normal ad-hoc… -
Apple ships latest version of Aperture for photo professionals
9 Feb 2010 | 9:00 amFiled under: Multimedia, Software, Software UpdateIt certainly caused a lot of excitement when the Apple web store went down this morning. No, it wasn't an updated MacBook Pro line but Aperture 3, Apple's high-end photo editing and image management software. The latest version is U.S. $199.00, and upgrades are available for any existing Aperture users for $99.00. Apple says Aperture 3 has "more than 200 new features", including Faces and Places, brought over from iPhoto '09. There is an enhanced tool called Brushes, which allows photographers to paint adjustments and filters directly onto…
