Microfinance Podcast Coincidence

This morning in my podcast queue I listened to two shows in a row that discussed microfinance. The first was more technical, the Ruby on Rails podcast interview with the MicroPlace developers. The second was the “My Needs/Your Needs” episode of the Heather Gold show, which included microfinance expert April Rinne. What’s interesting to me [...]

Popularity: 24% [?]

Project Wonderful Arbitrage

I’ve been experimenting with Project Wonderful ads on AmigoFish for some time. It’s never made that much money and what it brings in I just spend back out in placing ads myself. I mostly just like the idea of it and the purity of their mechanism even though now the distribution of advertisers skews heavily [...]

Popularity: 27% [?]

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The Beancounter Bubble

Here’s a sad article but one that seems true to me about how our country and economy has been sucked dry by beancounters.
The American ship is sinking from the weight of its own economic narcissism. Our accountants and finance professionals have been richly rewarded for squeezing the last microscopic drop of profitability out of [...]

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Buy Nothing Day

So in principle I support Buy Nothing Day. It’s the same message I’ve been preaching on here and in my podcast for years. No TV or goodie is as nice as the feeling of being out of debt. However, I’m buying something today. There’s an item we’ve been talking about getting for six months, is [...]

Popularity: 26% [?]

US Airways, Purveyors of Service

Sounds like US Airways and America West really made a hash of combining their reservation systems. US Airways is one of the common carriers out of Myrtle Beach and often these United tickets are cross-booked with them. I think they are the most consistently sucky airline I’ve ever flown. It’s not one thing, it is [...]

Popularity: 25% [?]

Keep Your Enemies Closer

Over at 37Signals, Matt blogs an article about how competition creates market niches, focusing specifically on the jockeying amongst Dunkin Donuts, Krispy Kreme and Starbucks for your caffeine and sugar dollar.
I’ve seen way too much wussiness about competition in the tech world, up to and including a CEO of a startup I worked at [...]

Popularity: 19% [?]

Timeline of Firing Sprint

I cancelled my new Sprint PCS service tonight. I’d had it for less than two weeks, and over the course of the evening decided I don’t want to be their customer. Here’s the timeline.
January 9 - We order new phones from Sprint
January 11 - We receive the phones. I test it out, and the microSD [...]

Popularity: 26% [?]

Bitpass Shutting the Doors

Here’s another startup in the act of biting dust. Micropayment company Bitpass is shutting the doors. The only thing that ever gave me the slightest reason to want to use them is that Scott McCloud’s online comics and Telltale Weekly both used them. In fact, McCloud was involved in the company as an advisor. I [...]

Popularity: 27% [?]

Socks Ain’t Business

There needs to be a better convention for blogging all the chain of a story as it reaches you. It always bugs me when everyone cites BoingBoing for things and ignore all the ways that they got the story. Let’s try this:
Yarn Harlot blogged this story which begat Majikthise which begat Teresa which begat [...]

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Culture Clash

Via Xark comes this enjoyable story about a meeting between Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist and some investment bankers. “What are your plans to maximize profits?” “We have no such plans.” Wow.
Popularity: 19% [?]

Popularity: 19% [?]

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No Change for Fish

In Myrtle Beach, there is a big touristy open air mall called Broadway at the Beach. It has a lot of boardwalks over a pond, and there are these big creepy koi in it. At many places, there are little vending machines for fish food - drop in a quarter and get a handful of [...]

Popularity: 18% [?]

Questions for Startup Founders

My friend Jason sent around a link to this page of interest to any of you entrepeneurial types. It is a list of questions founders of a startup should ask themselves and each other. Interesting stuff, and I don’t know that I disagree with a one of them. For an example of this working the [...]

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Geek Business Myths

Here is a cool article about the top 10 geek business myths. Here is my favorite one:
Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don’t protect it.
Reality: No one gives a damn about your idea until you actually succeed and by then it’s too late. Even on the off chance that you do manage [...]

Popularity: 19% [?]

Untitled

As of last Friday, I work for the third largest MSSP (managed security services provider.) It’s the largest “pure play” company now, meaning that we are the biggest company not in any other business but this. It’s not a sidelight, it’s the only thing we do and we focus on doing it well. Thus far, [...]

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Killing Podcasting

I mostly agree with this article from the Podcast NYC blog - killing podcasting one VC dollar at a time. I’ll admit that I have a pretty strong hard-off for Odeo, because I’m still bugged at all the fawning “Oh, here comes Evan to save podcasting” bullshit with folks talking about how wonderful they were [...]

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Future of Work

I heard an interesting talk on IT Conversations, Thomas Malone on the future of work. The basic thesis is that democracy is a function of the cost of communication, and that as communication costs dropped in society democracy emerged in governance. He posits that we will see democracy in business governance in the same sort [...]

Popularity: 26% [?]

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No It Isn’t

I’ve decided that anytime the phrase “our call is important to us” is uttered to me, unless a live human being is actually speaking it to me, I am going to interpret it as antagonistic bullshit that is self-evidently a lie. If my call actually was more important than keeping call center headcount down, I [...]

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Big Ad

It’s a big ad, my god it’s big!
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Paypal

This thought occurred to me the other day, as the sales of the stuff packages have led to a little buildup of money in my Paypal account that I have not yet converted to actual folding money. How much money sits in the Paypal system in steady state? They charge for some of their services, [...]

Popularity: 18% [?]

Mark Cuban vs the RIAA

Here’s an interesting post from Mark Cuban (whose blog I have just started reading regularly.) He wants to compile statistics on how file-sharing has affected industries to test the RIAA’s claims that it has hurt their business. He points out that DVDs, photographs and video games have all seen their sales go way up. He [...]

Popularity: 22% [?]

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