A buddy just sent me this video, it put me in a Holiday Mood for the day. I’ve been busy the past week, but I’m almost done with my Christmas Shopping. I’d say roughly 70% of the volume of my purchases have been online, but probably 80% of the $$ dollars spent were offline. Interesting to see how that would compare with the rest of the world.

I found this today somewhere I was as I was venturing off into one of my late night web travels. (On StartupMeme here, actually) I just thought this is pretty cool.

I used to have a ping pong table in my office …

I’ve been extremely busy for the past 5 weeks. There has been so much going on in my life from polar ends of good and bad. Both of my parents were diagnosed with cancer this year, my Mother’s is very serious and out of left field. Just another thing to conquer in this game of life, which has become much more serious to me. Not to harp on the negative, but this economy isn’t exactly brightening my mood. At the same time, some of the best things have happened in the last 5 weeks. Our company is expanding quietly and well positioned to handle whatever new curveballs this economy is going to throw at us (im sure there will be some more between now and the end of the year).

I haven’t posted anything at all in some time, I feel rather guilty about that because it helps me get my thoughts out and I love to hear what other people are thinking about (especially in regard to my thoughts). My thoughts on the economy I feel are pretty clear, and its nice to see other people around the blogosphere agree and to see some people with like-minded thoughts on this ridiculous message being sent to many businesses. (I’m paraphrasing here) “If your business model isn’t good enough, there is always someone else to throw some money at the problem.” With the exception of Lehman, and hopefully the freaking auto industry, we need to stop bailing out companies - big and small.  And I think that attitude is over for now, at least for the time being.

Anyway, I’ll try to stop the politically motivated ranting in the future, and get back to my thoughts on local, sweet, sweet local. A place where everyone and there mother suddenly has to be. Well, keep throwing money at it and then tell everyone about how much money you threw at it.

One company I’m a huge fan of CitySquares, although my direct competition, they just got an investment from Marc Cuban (well 2 weeks ago). TechCrunch didn’t have a mention that I could find. That is sick. Mark Cuban invests in your company and no party, no flashy press release to every news org ever. Although I’m sure there was a veritable party going on at their office… Congrats to CitySquares and to the whole industry of Local Search. Cause that is a huge name in a very small space. Either the space has to get bigger or the  name has to get smaller. I’m putting my money on the space getting bigger.

Warren Buffet is the man.

I’ve been somewhat out of the loop for the past couple weeks, for reasons which I will go into soon, but I’m taking a few minutes this morning to catch up on my feeds. I found a few intersting posts about the rediculousness of this panic and gloom:

• Seth Godin, my man. He usually manages to inspire me or to articulate significantly better what it is I am trying to get at. In this case he writes a post “Too Small To Fail” - Read it its great
• Howard Lindzon, new to me from a blogging perspective but I’ll be back for certain.  He also wrote a post “To SMALL to Fail!!!“  - Read it.

Most important to me in all of this was his comment on the rediculously obvious message some VC’s were sending to their portfolio in the midst of this crisis.

No offense, but get over yourselves.

If you have a good business, these letters are ridiculous in the timing. Maybe force them to read this letter upon funding and make them memorize it, but at this point, it reeks of panic and fear.

Now Mr Lindzon is in a much better position to say this than me, because as he says “they’re rich, and I’m not.”

Say what you want about Joe Biden he has a good quote: “Champ, when you get knocked down, get up. Get up.”

Thats what this country has to do right now - Get Back Up. I’ve no doubt we can do it.

I love Pandora. It has added some amazing new features and I’ve discovered some old ones as well. I haven’t written anything in a while, and something I saw on Pandora just got me motivated. For those of you who don’t know Pandora, here’s the Wikipedia: “Pandora is an automated music recommendation and Internet radio service created by the Music Genome Project. Users enter a song or artist that they enjoy, and the service responds by playing selections that are musically similar. Users provide feedback on the individual song choices — approval or disapproval — which Pandora takes into account for future selections.”

I use it all the time, when I have a long bought of work to accomplish I get a station going and I take full advantage of the thumbs up, thumbs down. Just now I noticed that when you click the thumbs up button, not only does it remember this and adjust the playlist accordingly, but it leaves a giant thumbs up in the background of the current song tile! So silly, but I loved it and it made me think about the devil in the details pitch I always try to give myself.

Pandora does it, they have all the details and they are loved by their users - over 40,000 new listeners everyday. It is a shame that the music industry is pushing them towards closing their doors soon.. (I can’t imagine that actually happens, its such a great service). I know alot of people are fans of last.fm, but I’ve never been to the site. No reason why not, just fell in love with pandora and stuck.

The devil is in the details and so is the the beauty. Keep goin Pandora, I’m pulling for you!

You can view my profile on pandora here

I got a hair cut a few days ago, so I thought I’d give my blog a new ‘do on this BEAUtiful Sunday.

I know I’ve said before that the design of the site doesn’t matter as much as the content, but I really hated the way it looked - so Vavoom, a few Sunday morning/afternoon hours later and now I’m happy.

What do you think?

Its been a few days since my last post. I’ve been completely buried with work, working 9 of the last 10 days. Last Saturday I played golf and turned my BlackBerry off for almost 12 hrs! Its been a good week, I’ve been all over the place but we’re seeing alot of growth across our sites, both in traffic and in advertising. We are preparing to launch 4 new sites over the next 4 weeks, which is a pretty intense schedule for us. Things are great, I’m just awfully tired and haven’t had much time to put my thoughts down here.

Its getting into the heat of summer, so there really isn’t a heck of alot going on, but there are a few. Look for a post a day from me for this week, I have alot of thoughts I need to get out.

When I was in college I used to say that I wasn’t lazy but I was energy efficient. Now I’m beginning to worry that as a nation we are becoming more lazy.

Hundreds of new applications and devices are being introduced each year that reduce the effort it takes to do something, and people are waiting in throes to purchase these things. Take the new iPhone which combines the internet, elements of a notebook PC, your mp3 device and a camera. With the new version comes an app store that allows you to upgrade and add to the already potent functionality of it. Here is a device that allows you to take several unique actions and communicate quickly and easily in many different ways, connecting you to the world around you better than ever before. Think back 10 yrs to putting dimes (now quarters) in payphones.
Let’s move on to another phenomenon that’s taking early adopters by storm - Twitter. Twitter takes two already efficient mediums and combines them: email and SMS. Taking quick blurbs about our lives we can quickly share them with the people around us who want to know.
Don’t take my tone to be overly negative, these efficiency innovations go right to the heart of capitalism. Creating something that makes peoples lives better or easier. A good example, I’m writing this from my blackberry poolside, and I will email it to my posting address and it will appear automatically, with minimal extra effort.

Humans have come so far in the past 30 yrs, just in the short lifetime of many of the entrepreneurs leading these new developments. Its fascinating to see how far we’ve come and where it might lead, but it all truly comes down to effeciency innovation.
How can we take this thing we enjoy and do it better and faster? The question that defines much of what we do today.

The future is coming at us more rapidly than ever before. A robot on Mars is having conversations with people via SMS, GPS is becoming a new way for people to connect to each other and everything seems be advancing at a frenetic pace. With all this madness, what do the people on the forefront of the technology field have to say about their predictions and outlooks.

Darren Herman began a new project called futurememe.org. The idea behind it is that “anyone can become a futurist.” I was able to be one of those anyones and posted some of my thoughts here. From the about page:

With people contributing their visions for the future from all over the globe, we can amass all of this information in one place and hopefully take action on it for positive change, be it social, technological, or economical.

The future of our world can be a scary or a wonderful place, and there are plenty of varieties for those visions. In college I got really into utopian/dystopian societies and see so many similarities in todays world to those dystopian visions of the 60’s, 70’s, and even back to the 30’s and 40’s. In Fahrenheit 451 people take heavy doses of relaxants and anti-anxiety pills and tune in every night to their “wall screens” (flat screen tvs?) where reading books is illegal and information is largely distributed in “factoids” short pieces of information devoid of context (twitter?). 1984 features new speak, where people combine words into one thats quicker to say (web log=blog), and people communicate via two way telescreens (video-conferencing). These dystopian novels of so many years ago reflect with amazing accuracy current situations.

With one notable difference, the vast majority of our current technology is a result of efficiency innovation. I don’t know how often that phrase is used but I’m coining it as one that I will be using often and reflecting on frequently. Our current level of efficiency innovation is unparralled in our history - it took 500 years to advance beyond the printing press, yet only about 100 yrs to advance from radio to tv to the internet. From records to tapes to cds to mp3’s - 30 yrs. From disk drives to dvds to solid state drives ~20 yrs. Think about where cloud computing will take us, imagine what the next Mars Rover will discover.

Its a great time to have an imagination, and an exciting time to play a part in the forefront of technology. The idea of futurememe.org gives everyone a place to share and grow their ideas of the future. I personally hope it grows and gets some of the lofty and interesting contributors Darren is seeking. The future is ours…

Ok, anyone who knows me knows I can get pretty fired up. And sometimes in the privacy of my computer I can get a little overzealous about my thoughts/feelings, especially related to recent experiences. I am also pretty good at acknowledging these blights, and when necessary correcting them. In the past few weeks, I think I may have transmitted some of these blights into this blog, so I’d like to address them.

I have of late been very hard on the financial markets and the coverage of them RE: their view on the internet. And in fairness, I live alot of my life on the internet, I run an internet company and I know a few people who do as well. However, coming across a few data points (particularly this one from Greg Sterling) about E-Commerce having basically flat growth and a few fairly average earnings reports, I think I was getting a bit ahead of myself. I know a good bit about the markets, I know alot more about the internet, but the internet is still a small piece of the economy, and as a whole of our nation, only the early adopters are really savvy to its power and potential. I guess I just never really considered myself and early adopter.

On a second point, I recently remarked on a meeting I had a few weeks ago and used the term “don’t get it.” After reading this post from Mark Cuban, I realized that in some way I was being lazy when discussing the potential project. I didn’t drill “it” down enough for them. Although I never actually used this term with them, nor would I (it is rather insulting), it hit me that in many ways I’ve rationalized deals that never happened or meetings that didn’t go well as them “just not getting it.” The important part of this is that it made me a little better, and now I realize I have alot more work to do to get to a level I didn’t realize I wasn’t already on. If that makes any sense.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure, or something like that.