Archive for the ‘Recommended Reading’ Category

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Iranians Using Internet to Subvert Gov’t

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

As you may know from reading some of my other postings, I’m always a huge fan of people who use the internet to stand up for their beliefs. In an interesting article posted on CNN, reports show a large scale Iranian resistance to the latest political “election” over the internet.

I think its fantastic to hear people standing up against this crazy theocracy they call a government, and moreso great to hear of more middle-eastern countries using the internet as a protest tool.

While the government is doing a good job of cracking down on political discourse, online Iranians are holding to their convictions strongly. I support them – Iran could really show its colors in the middle-east right now!

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Posted in IT & Tech, Recommended Reading

Microsoft Bing! Survives the Week

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Microsoft released their new search engine, Bing, earlier this month and has seen some small improvements as a result. Built off their existing LiveSearch functionality, Bing is essentially a face-lift to their previous search technology (a component of  MSN). This article on Yahoo! Tech gives some statistical breakdowns of the search engine shares. En-brief: Google 60%, Yahoo! 20%, Microsoft 10%.

At this point, I’m not sure how anyone could compete with Google on a reasonable level. Setting a company upon the task of essentially reading and ranking every single piece of written literature on the internet is an amazing task, not to mention the efforts of attacking the extremely solid Google brand. I feel like Google is to the point where its like Coke is to soda- its synonymous with search.

Good luck with that Microsoft, I’m stickin’ with Google.

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Posted in IT & Tech, Recommended Reading

Praise for CustomChannels

Friday, May 29th, 2009

I want to give a big virtual high-five to Dave Rahn and my associates at CustomChannels for the great article written about them in today’s Denver Post. While the radio industry itself suffers, its outside ideas like custom playlists on CD quality formats and genres targeted to listeners specific tastes that really stand out.

CustomChannels has a great crew and I’m proud to have collaborated with them on so many unique opportunities!

Read the article in the Denver Post here.

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Posted in Music, Random, Recommended Reading

RockBand Franchise Surpasses $1 Billion

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

I was reading this press release regarding Rockband on Punknews.org earlier today and was pretty astounded. Since Atari, Sega and Nintendo I’ve always said video games are the next big entertainment industry and they continue to prove me right.

Now I haven’t played much of the music game genres and can’t completely place my finger on why they’re so popular other than the recent US trend in the last decade to convince every little boy and girl that they want to be a rockstar. I’m not sure how I feel about that aspect of it (whatever happened to sex, drugs and rock n roll?), but I have to say the Rockband games have an amazing track record for breaking barriers for console games:

  • First music game to have downloadable content (this is huge! – used to be entirely PC only options)
  • One of the first cross-console games to offer full compatibility and interoperability between competing peripherals (leading to this whole new era of controllers that look like their objects)
  • One of the first games to be involved in releasing new albums from artists (Judas Priest and Motley Crue)

PC Games still have the towering income from online multiplayer games, but console is definately rising. You may also want to check out this article about the rise in video game revenue in the US, it was a $19 billion market in 2007 and continues to rise,  so start  buyin’ those games and boost the economy!

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Posted in Music, Recommended Reading

White House 2.0

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

Wow, I love new openness of our new administration. Mentioned in the President’s press address yesterday, there are a suite of tracking tools available at the new White House website.

You can check up on up-to-date issues via the blog, get details about the cabinet, and check out a whole range of pertinent info regarding the budget and recovery phases. There’s an interactive timeline of how the recovery project is progressing, and a complete readable breakdown of the president’s new budget (its even organized by department!). Also new is a spot where you can vote on the relevance of the next questions asked at the upcoming town hall discussion.

Very “web 2.0″. This definitely looks like the start of a true 21st century president.

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Posted in Random, Recommended Reading

E-Myth [Re]Re-Visited

Friday, March 20th, 2009

I finished reading the revisted version of the book E-Myth by Michael Gerber a few weeks ago. I’m not really a fan of all the trendy “self-help” books out there, but this one had come highly recommended by a number of my colleagues. I typically think most of the topics are common sense, and while many are in this book, I didn’t think it was half bad.

emyth

E-Myth - Michael Gerber

Maybe its because I’ve made many of the entrepeneurial mistakes outlined in this book myself, or maybe it just carried a certain entertainment value, but I consider it a success since it still has me thinking about a key theme. The main point Gerber makes is that solo proprietor really has three personalities: the entrepeneur or big idea guy, the techy who gets the work done and the manager who keeps it all organized; to really be successful one must try to encompass all three.

Thumb through it if you haven’t done so already, and I’m going to keep trying to be the best entrep-tech-ager I can be.

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Posted in Recommended Reading, business development

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