[Capital Gains Media] - Why do you play foursquare?
[Travis Stoliker] - I don’t “play” foursquare really. The points and mayorships are not the reason why I use Foursquare. I use foursquare as a means to track my activity, share it with friends, observe my friends activity and engage with others based on their location.

How does foursquare help you discover local venues, bars, and cafes?
This is an important part of Foursquare. While it is unlikely that your morning breakfast will be memorable enough to take the time to mention it on Twitter or Facebook, my friends will check-in on foursquare repeatedly at their favorite establishment and it is often somewhere I had never heard of. This lets me discover the places that my trusted group of friends frequent often so that I may uncover gems within my own community that I was previously unaware of.

What have you learned about your neighborhood via foursquare?
People love to drink. A lot.

Do any Lansing businesses offer incentives for foursquare players? Which?
None that I am aware of but it is only a matter of time. This is a missed opportunity currently.

About mayorships…
Are there particular places that you are often the mayor?
Honey Baked Ham, Los Tres Amigos in East Lansing and sometimes Liquid Web data centers.

Do mayorships general rotate weekly between a couple of people in a friendly competition or do they tend to be more random?
Foursquare is still a brand new technology and it is growing fast. It’s too new to have trends in my opinion

How often can/do you hold a mayorship?
Pretty much the whole time since I joined, but I am generally an early adopter. I should state that I don’t care if I’m the mayor of anything. I do it for the social aspect’s. I have never been fond of games.

Who’s playing foursquare in Lansing?
Thats a pretty easy answer, early technology adopters. In general it is the same crowd that was on Twitter with me 3 years ago. There is just a certain personality that is passionate about understanding new tools constantly.

What benefits do you think this type of competitive neighborhood exploring could bring to the tri-county area?
I disagree with the premise that it is competitive. It’s more like Boy Scout Merit badges, or whatever those things are. I wasn’t a boyscout as if that was a surprise. It’s not like you’re competing against other people, it’s more like you’re competing with yourself. The point, the badge, whatever, is it’s own reward. I do not see it as a comparative metric to quantify my social status.

Who are your foursquare friends? Are they friends from the 3-D or met via foursquare?
They are all my friends from real life. Mainly coworkers from LiquidWeb and twitter friends that are tech savvy.

Have you ever, say, met up with other foursquarers at a locale because they saw that you’d checked in there?
Absolutely. Several times after work a group of co-workers have met at a particular location and other co-workers joined simply because they saw the foursquare check-in. I have also had several occasions where multiple groups of friends were at the same location but only knew it because of the foursquare notification. This is by far the most personally valuable aspect of foursquare that I have found.

What has been the biggest surprise about foursquare?
How fast adoption has been. This is not the first “geo location social media” or whatever you want to call it. Google has one, Latitude. Twitter has geo-location enabled in their API. Facebook has some Geo features in development and it, in general, was started as a Geo product by being limited to College campuses. Here is the most important part of what I am going to say, Geo Location is the next big opportunity. Hyper local news, hyper local advertising, hyper local social media - these things all exist in some form currently but they have been limited due to price, availability (how many people have them) and distribution (was hard to sell mobile apps). These things have all converged. I am going out on a huge limb and I am not qualified to make predictions, that being said, I believe that where we sit right now with technological progression of mobile technology is similar to the the point of progression in Internet technology when most people had broad band access in their homes. After everyone had broadband in the home, everything was possible. It was “always on”, gave access to Audio, Video, large email attachments, high quality photos, and everything else we take for granted now. This, in my unqualified opinion, is where we are with mobile technology. Most people have a data plan. Most people have some version of a browser on their phone. Camera, video, GPS, truly high speed internet, and 3rd party app delivery. All this technology - always on them. This is gigantic. Foursquare is just the beginning of location aware technologies.

We tell our children stories in simple terms of Good Guys & Bad Guys with clear winners and clear losers. We set out with a moral message that we want to instill into our children and we tailor the details of the story to meet that objective.

When a child asks a question, we give them a simple answer:
Who discovered America? Columbus.
Why did we fight the civil war? To free slaves.
Who free’d the slaves? Abe Lincoln.
Why do terrorists hate us? They hate our freedom.

For children we do this because we feel that kids will be unable to comprehend a story that contains subtlety and nuance. We tend to believe that the added details will only confuse the “moral of the story” and the “message” will be lost.

We recognize and accept this blatant dumb’ing down of information for children, but it astonishes me how much we continue to do it for adults.

Just today I heard several news pundits on television dumb it down for adults. Tiger Woods was a hero. A perfect champion and because he could hit the ball well and had a terrific smile, we created a story that he was an alter boy. Of course soon after we find out he’s like most other married people on the planet and he cheated. Now we are supposed to be shocked???

We dumb down politics too. If you believe in low taxation - you are a republican. If you believe in helping others, you’re a democrat. Yet, in real life, I have never met a single person that is all republican or all democrat. Everyone is a mixture of something in the middle.

We say things like “sports figures shouldn’t be role models” — oh really, who then _should_ be our kids role models? Our hypocritical pastors like Ted Haggard that claim to be a righteous believer in god that hates gays, yet turns out to be gay himself?

Or maybe our children should have polticians as role models? Politicians like Mark Sanford (or the many others) that regularly cheat on their spouse?

Or maybe our children should worship Teachers? Teachers like Debra Jean LaFave that had sex with her 14 year old student.

We like to prepetuate a myth that things can be classified neatly into clear Black and White categories. That either a person is bad, or good. That a person is either right, or wrong. That in any event there is a good guy and a bad guy.

This is a dangerous myth.

You will never find a person that is all good, or all bad. This simplistic and childish act of categorizing everything into neat classifications is a futile effort that attempts to help a simple mind understand complex situations.

I have never met anyone that can be classified neatly.

This issue is very important to our country so I wanted to try to make it as simple as possible - a lot of facts are glossed over. Here is my best shot at the Valerie Plame incident in plain English.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney wanted to go to war with Iraq. Their primary justification was that Iraq was trying to obtain nuclear materials from Africa. (They had no credible evidence of this at all)

Diplomat Joe Wilson goes to Africa to investigate the claim, he finds no evidence Iraq sought weapons from Africa. Vice President and President disregard Joe’s investigation and continue to state the baseless claim that Iraq sought weapons from Africa.

Joe then publishes report saying “What I didn’t find in Africa” - This pisses off President and Vice President. So to discredit Joe, Vice President tells his chief of staff (who in turn tells all the press) that Joe can’t be trusted because his wife is a covert CIA operative (which had nothing to do w/ Iraq and Africa). By doing this the Vice President outed an undercover CIA operative, jeopardized national security, destroyed Valerie’s career and put anyone that worked with her in danger.

After we invade and find no WMD’s or nuclear weapons materials, Vice President makes his Chief of Staff fall on the sword and take the jail time. VP only says “I don’t recall” in testimony.

This is real mafia shit!!! Stated even more plainly - The President and VP used made up evidence to take us to war and when they were proven to be liars they violated the law by outing a CIA operative for the sole intention of political retaliation. - And by the way, Valerie and Joe Wilson were right.

I removed my introduction and the video from this playlist. If you would like to see them, check below the fold.

(more…)

This is a video that I used in my presentation to the East Lansing Rotary today. Thank you

Update: Video up

“Thank you very much for the honor of speaking to you, the future leaders of our community. Congratulations to all the graduates. Whether you realize now or not, your successful graduation today is a cumulative achievement shared by you, your family and your community. We should all celebrate it.

I was asked to speak today because your scheduled presenter was unable to be here. So I’m sorry to say but you’re stuck with the 2nd string presenter I only had a couple days to prepare for this presentation and I’m approaching 30 now so I’m a little out of touch with your generation. So I decided to ask some of my younger friends and relatives what they would want to hear about. The consensus was “what I wished I knew in high school” - so that will be the theme of our discussion today - I hope you approve.

But first let me start by telling you a little about myself because I know that if I was in the audience I would be wondering who the heck is this Dude talking? My name is Travis Stoliker. I grew up and graduated from Holt. Attended LCC and got my bachelors from Northwood. I’m the Son of a UAW tool and die maker for Generous Motors (as my grandmother called them) and my mother is a Realtor. I’ve traveled to a few places in the world as a product manager for the software company, TechSmith. Worked for WILX Channel 10. And now I am the Marketing and Sales director for Liquid Web. A web hosting company in Lansing. I’ve started my own company - that failed. I’ve been nearly fired from jobs for refusing to shave my beard and I had my neck cut by a hockey skate during my senior year in high school. — That experienced changed my life - and I want to start this speech by telling you why.

On Christmas break in 1997 my hockey team headed to Saginaw to play in a weekend tournament. I was playing center and one of my chief responsibilities was to keep the front of the goal cleared so that the goalie could see the puck at all times. As I was pushing the opposing teams player from the front of our net, he fell and the edge of his hockey skate cut a 6 inch long - very deep, cut in my neck. I lost a tremendous amount of blood and had to be rushed by ambulance for emergency surgery. I was awake through the surgery when the doctor told me I was a quarter inch away from dying .

That experience completely changed my perception on life, forever. I began to question every assumption that I had formed about life. I found a new thirst for life and I wanted to experience everything.

It took a near death experience to wake me up and call my attention to the incredible amount of possibilities we are all capable of pursuing. It made me realize that my life didn’t have to be a random collection of events which I passively observed from the sideline.

I started to realize that - You can make your life. You can choose to be great. You can choose to achieve your goals. But you can only do that if you make a choice. It doesn’t matter much what you choose, it only matters that you make a choice. Do you choose to be great? Are you capable of what that takes?

One of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell, has a new book out called Outliers which demonstrates that most of the successful people in the world have one unifying trait in common - ten thousand hours of experience in their field.

So I ask you now - If you knew that you could be the best at anything that you wanted to be - would you invest the ten thousand hours in it? Many of us want to be great - but we are unwilling to do the work.

I am begging you. Please, make a choice. Choose to be great. If you are willing to do the work, you are guaranteed success.

For all intents and purposes, today is the beginning of your adult life. Up until this point your parents, your society, even the law pretty much mandates that you get to this point. After high school is when it becomes your decision. It is the start of your adult life. Are you going to choose to be great? Or are you going to watch your life from the sideline?

So that is the first thing that I would have liked to know in High school - if I choose to be great today, I am guaranteed success.

I sound a bit like a optimist right now and a lot like a liar. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. I’m not going to be one of the people that tell you everyone is equal and you all have the same chance at success. The reality is that some of the people in this room are more intelligent than others, some are more attractive, some are more popular and some are going to be more successful.

I am not saying it’s going to be easy for everyone - what I am saying is that if you want to change something - with enough time - you can change anything.

The second thing that I wished I had known in high school is - Failure is okay but results matter.

One of my married friends was talking the other day about their kids soccer team and how they don’t keep score anymore. They want to encourage the children to play for the love of the sport and not be focused on competing with the other team. They don’t want any of the children to feel like they lost. — We have a tendency to do that in society now. We try to pretend like failure doesn’t exist. We pretend like everyone is a winner - all the time. This isn’t just prevalent for children. It is pervasive throughout our society. If a company fails - we bail it out. If our school can’t pass MEAP, we lower the threshold. If our government lies to get us into a war, we are complacent. Our society has decided to ignore failure. To pretend like we cannot learn from our mistakes.

I am here to tell you that the most memorable learning experiences in your life will be your failures and the most successful people in the world are the ones that are not scared to risk failure over and over and over!

Failure is okay. Failure is the result of risk and risk is the only way to attain reward. Do not let your failures distract you. Accept them - learn from them - and move on. You will be better for it, I assure you. Do not think you are a failure simply because one of your ideas was.

That leads me to my third point - have ideas - not beliefs.
Beliefs are hard to change, but idea’s can flex with time and evidence. Beliefs are things that get people burned at the steak. Beliefs are what make people hate without logic.
Ideas on the other hand can change the world. Ideas are what make you great. Ideas can change with time. Ideas can be discussed. Idea’s can be shared.

People get “personal” about beliefs but people get Passionate about Ideas.

When you have an idea, it can change with time and an accumulation of evidence. This is important. Now that you are an adult, you are judged by your logic and your evidence. From this point on, you will not be given credit simply for your effort, simply for completing your homework, or showing up to class. From this moment on, you are an adult. And adults are judged, or should be judged, only be the quality of their arguments and the results of their actions. If you hold ideas that are wrong, it is up to you to change them and improve yourself. Continual improvement is paramount to your ongoing success. Never settle. Never stop improving. Never stop learning.

The last thing that I would have liked to know when I graduated High school is not something that I take any pleasure in telling you. But unfortunately, I believe it to be true. — Your high school diploma isn’t worth much. Your parents High school diploma was more valuable for them than your bachelors degree will be for you.

Now I’m not saying that you don’t need a high school diploma. That would be like saying you don’t need elementary school or you don’t need to be potty trained. No - high school is important. But it is an expectation now. It is a minimum requirement. It is a prerequisite for adulthood. But your high school diploma is NOT going to measurably change your life in the next few years. No employer is going to ask to see it. It’s not something you should hang on your wall. It’s not going to unlock any doors to amazing careers with huge salaries, job security and generous retirement packages.

Your High School diploma is not your finishing line. It is your starting line. This is where your life begins. Your teachers and family generously provided you with their perspective on life. They gave you the tools to understand the world but now it is your turn to see if they were right! I’m not going to tell you that you have to go to college. That would be presumptuous and ironic considering my 27 year old boss is a multi millionaire without a single college credit. I am not telling you that you must go to college - but I will warn you that it’s going to be the number one question at your open house, so get ready!

College is not a requirement - but life long learning is. If you expect to retire from the job that you take out of college, you are kidding yourself. You will most likely have changed jobs five times by your 30th birthday. You will have multiple career changes throughout your life. You will be engaged in life long learning and continuing education for your entire career.

Did you know that today the top careers which are in the highest demand - did not exist 4 years ago. That means that if you start college today, we will be preparing you for jobs that don’t yet exist. Technology and globalization have changed the speed of innovation. Everything is faster now. The successful people in this room will be the ones that realize that.

Your life is an exercises in trial and error. Testing and refining. You’re opinions and views on the world are going to shift dramatically over time. Some of the things that you believe today will be proven wrong. But don’t worry - It’s all okay. — That permanent record we told you about, it doesn’t exist. You will be great. If you choose to be.

It is possible that one of you will cure cancer. It is possible that one of you will be the first to cure Multiple Sclerosis, an illness my mother has. Your have the opportunity to solve many of the biggest problems that humanity faces. Like energy, health care, poverty, water supplies, the for nuclear war and on and on and on. Do you realize what you are all capable of? Because I am and I am honored that you asked me to be here with you today to celebrate your accomplishment.

Thank you very much.”

Microsoft.com feature about how Liquid Web uses Microsoft servers.

CapitalGains Magazine featured me in their article “10 People to Follow on Twitter”

WILX interviewed me for their story, “Digital Dirt”

Transcript:
“Don’t look for the hiring slowdown to change any time soon.

According to the most recent employment outlook from Manpower staffing, only 15% of companies nationwide plan to add staff between April and June, while 14% plan to slash jobs.

It’s the weakest employment forecast since 1982.

Here in Michigan, the picture is even more bleak in some areas.

In the Flint area, 6% more companies plan to fire than hire workers.

In Detroit, 5% more businesses plan to shrink.

And in Grand Rapids, 1% more will downsize.

But the Lansing area is actually the bright spot in the state, with 6%more companies planning to add jobs rather than slash them.

Diane Mansfield, Manpower, Lansing: “I think the most encouraging part is 66% are looking to stay the same, so there’s not a huge number that are going to layoff within the next quarter, so hopefully there’s some light at the end of the tunnel.”

The Manpower survey finds information technology companies like Liquid Web of Delta Township are among the few hanging out the help wanted sign.

Mona Shand shows us why even in a down economy, high-tech has high potential.

From the loud buzz of computer servers to the quiet hum of the call center, it’s the sound of success: a company growing against the odds.

Travis Stoliker, Liquid Web Marketing Director: “We’re still experiencing very strong growth. We are still hiring at an incredible rate and we expect that to continue for the rest of the year.”

With the shrinking economy, the company’s not growing quite as fast as in the past, but they’re still in need a constant supply of workers.

Travis Stoliker, Liquid Web Marketing Director: “We have hired as many as 10 people a month. Now we’re scaling back a little bit, but still it looks like about four to five people every month.”

And Liquid Web says it’s not alone, their IT competitors are also thriving.

Travis Stoliker, Liquid Web Marketing Director: “If you look at the overall trends, you’re seeing most of the hiring being done by technology companies that are providing a service that is of value to businesses and to consumers.”

To get the jobs, you do need to have the skills.

Travis Stoliker, Liquid Web Marketing Director: “Most of the people we hire are geeks and we’re proud of that.”

It’s a title that doesn’t sound so bad considering it comes with job security. “

Here are a couple videos I shot from the nose bleed section.

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