Software, Digital Content, Geopolitics, Economics & More from of a Libertarian Serial Expat and Entrepreneur
In: best & worst practices|digital lifestyle|sales & marketing
16 Apr 2004I’m impressed by the work Photoflex, a lighting company, and its partner Olympus did at WebPhotoSchool. This site teaches you what kind of gear you need and how to use it with great showcases spelt out step by step, layman language. This is how to sell technical products to non-technical customers. Don’t talk down to [...]
In: search engines
15 Apr 2004Since John Battelle is hyping it like the new slicebread and everybody is getting excited, let me throw a few links from my archives, just follow the trail: Creating a Personal Web Notebook (a post about Udi Manber’s work, dated 10/17/00) Amazon hires algorithm guru (11/08/02) Will Search Engines Learn from Our Fumbling? (02/24/04, about [...]
In: software
14 Apr 2004Chris Pratley provides a good overview of what product management is all about, first because you need to frame your decisions in a business context, and then because it’s easy to ask for, say, "RSS support," but it’s harder to define the actual usage scenarios you’re going to address: "First a word of caution – [...]
You know those unbearable intersticials at Yahoo Groups that get in the way of reading a message every 4 posts or so? Just subscribe your gmail address on a post-by-post basis, and you no longer have to bear with them to browse list archives. I don’t want to clog my own POP3 accounts with discussion [...]
It’s been a couple of years since I last played with Quotetracker ("a Windows program that provides streaming real-time quotes, Live intraday charts with Technical Indicators, Level II quotes, Time and Sales, alerts, news monitoring, and everything else you may need to effectively trade in today’s market") so I’m glad to see it’s still alive [...]
In: music
9 Apr 2004I started playing a bit with Traktor, and you really can’t improvise yourself a DJ. The first thing I’d need to do is know my tracks better, metatag them by BPM, and take notes as to what mixes well with what (the basics). Way down in my priority list, but I’ll hopefully get the time [...]
In: music
9 Apr 2004AP: "All five of the major music companies are discussing ways to boost the price of single-song downloads on hot releases – to anywhere from $1.25 to as much as $2.49. It isn’t clear how or when such a price hike would take place, and it could still be months away. Sales of such singles [...]
In: fun
8 Apr 2004Erik Benson has a fascinating post about the people in your head and how to bribe them to go along with whatever your consciousness wants to do. Makes me feel more sane, or alternatively this is just an elaborate trick to make people like me come out of their schizophrenic closet and round them up. [...]
Douwe Osinga keeps playing with Google News and a world map. Now he maps how many references to each country are made at a given time. Douwe also points out this would be interesting to track and animate over time to see the moving hotspots and cold zones. Time is the data axis missing from [...]
What Flickr does for pictures, TuneCircle wants to do for music libraries. I’d be more interested in seeing that kind of functionality embedded into file sharing apps than having to go to a separate environment, and the site is rather sparse at this point (at least the part you can read without creating an account). [...]
I'm CEO of an online trade publishing firm in the marketing and defense verticals. We try to make news and data digestible and useful in an environment that is more noisy each day. This personal blog mixes my thoughts and interests on politics, business, software, and more, based on my business and personal experiences. Over the years I have posted items that turned out spectacularly wrong, and a few posts that stood the test of times better. Personal views only.