bigohms

I'm surprised to learn Megaupload is a Kim dotcom, aka Kimble production.

As Larry David told Ari Gold in Entourage: "I dont know what you talking about, youre talking chinese!" in all seriousness, i agree and am thankful there are people dedicating their lives to answering some of these fundamental questions.

What's your app?

Obviously. Its not built for function but coolness with the general intarwebZ and visiting customers and execs. I very much doubt that anyone at Stack is going to use that as well with the fonts as small as they are.

I've studied branding and specifically naming extensively. There are two important factors: 1) don't go generic or too long 2) memorable wordsmithing improves initial recall after a person is impressed upon the brand.

After you make the impression and deliver the experience: naming does not matter.

For example: We no longer associate Hotmail with sex, but when it first came out people were afraid of the impression it would have if your address ended with it. Now, it's second nature as an old(er) web based email service.

I kinda expected more from a group hosting millions of conversations a year and undisclosed$$ derived from it. Think bigger, like Visa's NOC big...

http://images.fastcompany.com/upload/visa-headquarters.jpg

Can we see a link to your LinkedIn profile?

As you grow, don't get too confident in your skills to the point of becoming condescending with non-coders. Always stay friendly, humble and open to learn new things. Stay relevant.

Try searching for something

Emailed to discuss.

I'm a business/tech founder and very interested, also like to know the expense side and what competitors are in the same space.

I agree but I think it's more a matter of expression of not necessarily tangible concepts with speech, which is not an inherently perfect system of description. In these situations, abstraction is critical as it allows for experiences, knowledge and feeling to fill in the gaps. The use of this technique for this purpose is infrequent and most people use it for pure laziness of not being able to accurately an succinctly form verbal descriptors

Make topics appropriate to real life situations, don't just provide definitions (A VC's MBA Mondays blog does this already).

Agreed. The poster most likely has one and didn't state the fact. It is a requirement to have a government issued ID card (with number) to apply and receive disability benefits.

Several of our clients, big consulting firms for the gov heavily use these and have no qualms about picking them up.

Sure. Checked the site and yes, message and presentation is a bit off for B2B. Email me and I'll reply with my thoughts omid at Rennzer dot com

Also your sales process will need to be a little more expansive than just linkedin in mail messages. Download or buy "Selling to Big Companies" by Jill Konrath. B2B is a slow slog but there is some potential. Be advised that what you're proposing isn't really defensible from being replicated. There is no secret sauce. Broadcasters news feeds are already running through packaging scripts for the web, this would be the Facebook component. Companies may want to just put their own ads on a HTML5 player and keep 100% of the revenues. And they have the resources to get it done.

Most stations in the US are now posting content transcribed directly to their own websites with clips of the appropriate story already. Promotion is the then directed to twitter/fb on an automatic or selective basis. Is this basically what you are talking about? In the scenario above, people find out about the content through search or directed discovery or one of the aforementioned social streams.

If so, then please understand that I don't think you've thought through your hypothesis and gauged demand enough. News shows purposefully put the best content at the end of a show because they want people to slog through the 15 or so commercials in the 3 breaks before consuming it. Notice this whenever there is a juicy story or big weather prediction.

Enmass show viewership pays more than selectively pulling out the good bits. AftEr the fact, the value of the content would be zero anyway, so it's repurposed for web use.

I would validate your hypothesis with both the consumer and customers. If you can't see it working, pivot. Perhaps a subscribable video playlist based on topics (like good alerts) not channels (like YouTube).

if you use this idea and it generates revenue, I want 2 percent.

You are a contractor brought on to keep the wheels turning to see of there is light at the end of the tunnel. If you wanto to have a come to Jesus moment with the executive in charge, know what you are putting on the table (chips). If you're ready, make your case in a way that will show the return on your efforts for a deal. Make sure you have all the deal points laid oort. Start the conversation with : "what do you want to do with X" and go from there.

Personal liability: not likely but document the impact of your work. Make sure you write out a summary and send it to the executive. Send a copy to a personal email.

Protection? Blittle.

Just make sure you state your case, explain your proposed solution and expect a response of some kind. Be prepared to whack away.

The fact is that very rarely do you get the sex and the brains in one package, in both women and cofounders. Learn to manage personalities and balance with your own, then go rule the world. Make sure he is committed to seeing this one idea through before hopping off to the next adventure.

Don't switch from Adwords yet: optimize. I don't know how your campaigns work, but we have clients in the same niche and run hundreds of campaigns each with hundreds of creative. Then look at the heuristics of buying cycles and ramp up in periods of lower buying cost and higher output. Also make sure you try Facebook, that also works very well when you undersand the targeting and optimization. Ads are mostly persistence and optimization. I would forgo affiliate. Try to avoid eBay as it will commoditized your product. Focus on the experience, your site is already quite nicely appointed. Also try specific branded experiences to draw people in, take a cut from how the open heart pendants are sold by a reputable retailer.

If I can answer any specific q's, hit me up at omid at Rennzer dot com

Thanks for this

Wow. I didn't expect this one bit from Arrington. I'm surprised he is choosing to mine Internet archives for blog fodder over putting that much more time into guiding his portfolio to fewer mistakes and possibly 1% more potential.

Startups, hard? Yes. We ALL know this. Are his opinions skewed towards his agenda? Also yes. There is no hiding the fact that he's in the money. The problem is that the "thought-leader" portion of his rant was lacking. And it's a bit of unfair baseball to bring up a random blog post from some guy nearly 20 years ago. My bets are that he didn't even bother doing follow up on this guy after the fact.

This is nice of you. However, a logo is the essence of a brand and it's very important to get right. Before a ton of us go and pitch you, let's get a sense of your work?

Treat and frame it like a recruiter payout but only 10% or less. Going with a model they're familiar with will reduce the friction. Great hires are never docked for recruiter fees.

Are the companies you working with going to actively short the comp of a junior rails dev hired through this program (treating the 6K as a training incentive) or will graduates theoretically get market rates (treating the 6K as a hiring/headhunting bonus)?

Filter this into a prioritized list that you see cursory potential to solve a problem, ordered by size of the problem (in terms of market size or cost). Take #1, create some assumptions and subject it to a "validation towel off" by speaking to the consumer and the customer (can be one of the same, may be different). Lather, rinse and repeat.

Salam beresoon

I second Scott's work. Highly recommend

I dropped FF b/c of the memory leak. As a test, on a spare mac I wrote a script that launched FF and Chrome simultaneously and visited 10 websites I frequent. They both had similar clean profiles. After roughly two days of continuous refresh/load cycles, Chrome's memory was at 148MB, FF was 988MB.

Your friend has institutional knowledge, education and potential drive to get out of his career slump. A CS degree in a helpdesk job is a misalignment of resources and a risk to the overall motivation of the team. Help him realize his goals and give him a chance. Go grab coffee. Have a heart to heart discussion with him. Ask him what he wants. Tell him what you have. Be very clear on your expectations of him and that you are laying your career on the line by choosing to hire him. Make it clear that there needs to be a period of 60 days to make sure this is the right fit for everyone. Ask him for an updated resume. Use these points to justify your decision to hire and make a decision. Utilize your new hire to the max to offload some of your work and give him a trial by fire to catch up. If anyone second guesses your decision, back it up with the points here.