“Going back to Cali, Cali, Cali…” Yesterday was a bitter-sweet day. I’m excited, nervous, sad, happy, out of my mind, but motivated. I’ve moved to San Francisco. It was a tough decision but with everything going on and my future plans, dreams and goals it’s the best move for life today.

I’ve been a long time geek, entrepreneur, blogger, designer and then some and my long time dream was making it big in Silicon Valley. Until last year I never thought it would be possible but then NewME Accelerator happen and that changed everything. I think back to 2009 while planning and giving my first Ignite talk at Ignite Raleigh the topic was 19 reasons why the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) is better than Silicon Valley. It was a fun presentation but doing it really just showed that being that I had never been to Silicon Valley at the time it was silly and also showed I was a little jealous and wanted to move. The Triangle community is great, has been great to me and the web/tech scene has come a long way in the past two years especially in Durham, NC. But being that I just attended an innovation Raleigh meeting where they are still trying to play catch up and establish Raleigh as an entrepreneur hot bed, I now agree and see why Vivek Wadhwa made some of his comments a few years ago about the community. No diss just the truth.

Today will be my first full day in San Francisco and I’m focused to work hard and succeed. A few days ago while visiting parents my dad asked me what do you do for fun in Silicon Valley. My response was there are things to do but you work. You work on your startup, your company, your dreams and when you launch or get funding you work even harder. That’s fun, it’s fun for me and what I love to do and it’s what I’m going to do. I’m not a big Drake fan as a few close friends know but in the words of Drake in “the Motto” #YOLO = “You only live once” and for me I rather try to make it and go after my dreams than look back a year or two years from now and say I wish I would have done this or that.

The projects I’m currently working on are:
NewME – Accelerator, Community
gokit – cofounder/advisor
Vouch
Advising Startups and Entrepreneurs
Designing, Learning and Networking: HTML5, CSS3, javascript, python, iOS, Android and more.
Speaking: Conference/University, Entrepreneurship

Thanks for the support to everyone over the years. I’m making a few big sacrifices now with the plans to succeed later. The quote by finical expert Dave Ramsey which has been adopted entrepreneurs “If you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else.” … That’s my plan.

Let the “fun” begin and Change the world!

Quote: Steve Jobs
“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith”

“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. ”

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

“Stay hungry and stay foolish”

Stay Focused & Keep Shipping!

As we all know, February is Black History Month. It’s a month where we honor those who have made an impact on American culture for equal rights, those who have invented, those who have a helped others and those who have inspired everyone to be the best they can be, not only as a person of color but as a human. For the past two years for Black History Month, I started an online series called 28 Days Diversity where I would feature someone new everyday during the month of February for just being awesome in their own right. Even though it’s black history month, the goal for 28 Days of Diversity is to feature not just African-Americans but other minorities in the web/tech space. Also note that 28 Days of Diversity is not a popularity contest or an influencer list but a list of thought leaders in the social web sector, including entrepreneurs, bloggers, conference organizers, IT professionals and friends not ranked in any particular order who I have either met in person or followed online. Each post will include a picture, bio, two links from the selected person and this paragraph.

For 2012 I wanted to not just feature individuals but also ask a question to where each featured person could share their passion with others. For 28 Days of Diversity 2012 each post/person will answer the question “What motivates you to become successful?”

For the next 29 days since 2012 is a leap, come back to visit SocialWayne.com/tag/28daysofdiversity and/or 28daysofdiversity.com to see who’s on the list. For day 3, I would like to introduce to some and present to others:

Rob Fields

Photo Credit: Ed Marshall Photography NYC

Twitter: @robfields

Website/Blog: nbifestival.org

Bio

Rob Fields is the Founder and Chief Curator of the Festival of the New Black Imagination, a platform for forward-looking, global black culture that launched in 2011. The Festival is a natural outgrowth of the work that he’s been doing on his black alt music and culture blog Boldaslove.us.

What motivates you to become successful?

A belief that a fresh conversation about what blackness means in the 21st century is not only good for black people, but for the country as a whole.

As we all know, February is Black History Month. It’s a month where we honor those who have made an impact on American culture for equal rights, those who have invented, those who have a helped others and those who have inspired everyone to be the best they can be, not only as a person of color but as a human. For the past two years for Black History Month, I started an online series called 28 Days Diversity where I would feature someone new everyday during the month of February for just being awesome in their own right. Even though it’s black history month, the goal for 28 Days of Diversity is to feature not just African-Americans but other minorities in the web/tech space. Also note that 28 Days of Diversity is not a popularity contest or an influencer list but a list of thought leaders in the social web sector, including entrepreneurs, bloggers, conference organizers, IT professionals and friends not ranked in any particular order who I have either met in person or followed online. Each post will include a picture, bio, two links from the selected person and this paragraph.

For 2012 I wanted to not just feature individuals but also ask a question to where each featured person could share their passion with others. For 28 Days of Diversity 2012 each post/person will answer the question “What motivates you to become successful?”

For the next 29 days since 2012 is a leap, come back to visit SocialWayne.com/tag/28daysofdiversity and/or 28daysofdiversity.com to see who’s on the list. For day 2, I would like to introduce to some and present to others:

Sian Morson

Twitter: @xianamoy

Website/Blog: kollectivemobile.com

Bio

Sian is CEO & Founder of Kollective Mobile, and brings 15+ years of experience in digital development and leadership to the mobile marketplace. She has a passion for creative information design, a strong technical background, and a talent for developing a team culture of user experience innovation and effective product development. Her skills, excellent client relations, and drive and determination have made her a well-respected force in the industry.

Sian started her career as the dotcom boom was changing the fundamental way that we communicate, share ideas, and bring products to market. A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she studied Film & Television but soon became enthralled by the incredible artistic and social potential in web technology; She went on to earn a Masters degree in Interactive Media Design from Middlesex University in London.

In 2010, she founded Kollective Mobile, a mobile development agency based in Oakland, CA. Kollective helps agencies and start-ups design and grow their mobile business, by providing strategy consulting and building great apps. Currently, Sian leads client relations and drives strategy and product development, including ArtKollect, our mobile and web solutions for art professionals.

What motivates you to become successful?

What motivates me to become successful is my core belief that information is power. We are living in an unprecedented time in history.We have access to so much more information that our ancestors did. What we do with it today will determine the tomorrows of generations to come. I am passionate about bridging the ‘digital divide’ and ensuring that our communities aren’t left behind. It is my hope that with with so many black tech entrepreneurs and start-ups with black founders that we can reach back and help those who are less fortunate than we are. It’s great to market apps and products to early adopters but it is critical that we remember our own communities as well.

As we all know, February is Black History Month. It’s a month where we honor those who have made an impact on American culture for equal rights, those who have invented, those who have a helped others and those who have inspired everyone to be the best they can be, not only as a person of color but as a human. For the past two years for Black History Month, I started an online series called 28 Days Diversity where I would feature someone new everyday during the month of February for just being awesome in their own right. Even though it’s black history month, the goal for 28 Days of Diversity is to feature not just African-Americans but other minorities in the web/tech space. Also note that 28 Days of Diversity is not a popularity contest or an influencer list but a list of thought leaders in the social web sector, including entrepreneurs, bloggers, conference organizers, IT professionals and friends not ranked in any particular order who I have either met in person or followed online. Each post will include a picture, bio, two links from the selected person and this paragraph.

For 2012 I wanted to not just feature individuals but also ask a question to where each featured person could share their passion with others. For 28 Days of Diversity 2012 each post/person will answer the question “What motivates you to become successful?”

For the next 29 days since 2012 is a leap, come back to visit SocialWayne.com/tag/28daysofdiversity and/or 28daysofdiversity.com to see who’s on the list. For day 1, I would like to introduce to some and present to others:

Will Lucas

Twitter: @will_lucas

Website/Blog: about.me/will_lucas

Bio

Will Lucas is the founder and CEO of AWLCo that houses web projects such as thankyouaga.in (http://thankyouaga.in), a mobile application that helps users “collect the good”, vinyu (http://vinyu.com), a mobile check-in application that enhances the consumer shopping experience, and Classbag (http://classbag.in), an educational web platform. Lucas founded Creadio (http://creadio.com), a custom Internet streaming service that develops custom radio and television stations for brands to promote their products and services in-house in 2007. It produces custom networks for some of the worlds largest brands.
A musician, innovator, and former radio DJ, Lucas is also curator for TEDxToledo, and a respected speaker on technology, entrepreneurship, and social issues.

He is a husband and father of one.

What motivates you to become successful?

“I want to fulfill my maximum potential. That’s really it. Success is just a byproduct of that. I heard someone say ‘You judge yourself based on what you know you can do, others judge you based on what you’ve done.’ I want to make it matter that I lived.”

It’s that time of the year again, the emails have been send and the list has been made! February is black history month and for the past two years I’ve posted a series called 28 Days of Diversity.

The History

As someone in the technology/web/social space, I often travel and attend various events in the industry and notice a huge lack of diversity, and when it comes to getting attention from mainstream media/tech blogs it’s almost impossible(in 2010). That’s why I started 28 Days of Diversity on SocialWayne.com in 2010.

The goal of 28 Days of Diversity is to feature someone new everyday for the month of February for just being awesome in their own right. The list will include some leaders in the social web space, startups, bloggers, conference organizers, IT professionals and friends NOT ranked in any particular order. Each post will include a picture, bio, social media profiles provided from the selected individual and this paragraph. It’s my simple way of giving back.

via About 28days of diversity

Since 2012 is a leap year that means it’s 29 Days of Diversity. Like the previous years I’ll cross post the profiles here on SocialWayne.com, the 28daysofdiversity.com, weekly recaps on BlackWeb20.com and this year on google+ along with sharing the post on twitter and facebook. The hashtag for this year is… #29DaysofDiversity

I’m excited about the 29 individuals selected for 2012. Last year I asked each participate “How can we use technology to close the digital divide?” The question for 2012 is “What motivates you to become successful?” I’m looking forward to the responses.

As always, thank you for the support, friendship, following on social networking sites and reading SocialWayne.com. Have a great 2012!

About Guest Author: Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics such as voip phone systems and telemarketing to small businesses and entrepreneurs for Resource Nation.

From smartphones and tablets to social media and comment forums, people have learned to chat in every way possible. People love to stay connected and stay busy, so chatting during downtime seems to be the perfect solution. For this reason, chatting is becoming more and more high tech. So what does this mean for your business?

This means that your business should be utilizing live chat on its website. Consider some of the benefits live chat can have for your company:

Why Customers and Companies Love Live Chat

1. Save Money – The actual live chat software is very inexpensive, and your company can save by allowing employees to do more things at once. In other words, employees can chat to several different customers all at once as opposed to one at a time on the phone. And trust, having ten chat windows open for most future generations is a cinch. Employees will also likely prefer this method because they will feel extra busy.

2. Customer Convenience – Many customers want to buy online, but they often have questions that are better answered in the store. Live chat brings together the best of both world, and I think you will find that customers will embrace live chat for this exact reason. They will be able to get the answers they want when they want them without having to wait on a traditional business phone system for someone to help.

3. Competition – Although chatting online is second nature to many consumers, offering live chat is a fairly new idea in the business world. In other words, you will have a lot of customers interested to use your new service without the competition.

4. Increase Revenue and Customer Satisfaction – There is often a lot of back and forth that happens when someone is making a purchase. If they are making the purchase online, they very well might consider a few questions that lead them to turn away from the product or service. Had someone been there answering their questions right away, they may have made a different decision. According to a study reported in Forbes magazine, Wells Fargo used online chat and found that their customer satisfaction scores significantly increased.

5. Efficiency – One of the reasons live chat is so convenient and can help save a company money is because everything gets done faster. Employees will be able to talk with concerned customers faster and customers will be able to get their questions answered faster; thus increasing the overall time spent on a sale. This will allow your company to be more efficient with its time.

If you think that live chat is right for your company, consider trying a few different software first before making a decision. Most software does offer a free trial, so have your employees try it out and see what they think. It’s important that any employee utilizing free chat is trained in the program as well as how to talk with customers via live chat. For more information on software, visit Top Ten Reviews.

Photo Credit: vietave.com

About Guest Author: Kelly Jones writes for www.ocnissanirvine.com. She writes for blogs as a hobby and enjoys exploring new avenues in the social sphere. Her interest encompasses a wide range of subjects ranging from technology to cooking and traveling.

With the ever increasing dominance of Social Media and our lives being all over Facebook, one needs to take some measures to analyze your Facebook profile periodically so that you can keep on using it without any adverse effects on your public profile.
It is always beneficial to review your FB profile as the site keeps on changing and we keep on adding friends, posting pictures and updates without thinking on a long term basis.

Some steps that will help you in managing your profile and cleaning it up include:

1. Editing Friends
Nowadays, we keep on adding friends and the more the number, bigger is the ego boost. We should try to cleanse the friend list periodically. One should always question do we really need that person whom we only said a cursory hi at a party as a friend and do we want him to view our Holiday pics. If you delete people from the friend list, they would not know and you can get rid of unwanted baggage.

2. Friend lists
You should use the Friend Lists feature judiciously to arrange posts, pictures and updates so that only the people you want to share can actually view them. You can defines posts based on location, school family, work etc and this helps in keeping things private and public at the same time. Create groups and use them to refine your profile.

3. Sharing Info
Always keep you profile info updated as Facebook suggest lists based on the latest info. Keep you bio updated along with the personal choices and info shared. If you want, you can also hide info that you want to keep private like religious and political views.
Check you like pages and see if you want to update them and let go of some. Facebook uses this to show ads to your friends so be careful.
Get rid of the apps that you no longer use as they have access to you data. Refine the notifications list. Then update your privacy settings to refine what you want to share.

4. Review the changes made
Once you have made all the changes and updated the profile, then test and review the updated version.

As Facebook keeps on making changes on a regular basis, one should review and update our profiles on a monthly, quarterly, half-yearly or an annual basis so as to keep our profiles updated.

This infographic, A History of Disruptive Innovations in B2B Marketing, looks at breakthrough technologies and processes that forever changed one segment of the world: the lives of B2B marketing professionals.

But the release of this infographic is emblematic of another change — albeit a smaller, more nuanced change. It heralds a refined approach to content marketing.

A History of Disruptive Innovations is different. We are releasing it jointly with a new product. Why? Because the product, called Eloqua Engage for iPad, is the convergence of four of the disruptions expertly visualized by JESS3 in this infographic.

Eloqua Engage for iPad enables sales to easily customize and fire off emails to leads from their iPad using templates pre-built by marketing. Best yet, the correspondence is automatically updated in the user’s Eloqua databases.

Infographic Description: The enterprises are witnessing a transformation led by smartphones and Tablets. Mobility is slowly becoming a critical part of IT strategy. As employees and business processes go mobile, we tried to decode enterprise mobility, crunch numbers to present before you an informative infographic detailing out the technology used in enterprise mobility, industry verticals that are at the forefront of mobilizing its operations and why enterprises are adopting mobility solutions. Our enterprise mobility infographic also takes a look at the state of enterprise applications, the smartphone deployment approach by industries and how big brands are increasingly deploying apps.

Infographic by Enterprise mobile consultants at [x]cube LABS

According to John D. Sutter, writing for CNN:
“The fact that centers of tech innovation are emerging all over the globe – not just in that mountain-ringed, strip-mall-plagued valley near San Jose, California – is both encouraging and fascinating. Many of these emerging tech hubs are exporting technologies and ideas that could have impact all over the world, not just in their respective regions.”
In this infographic, we examine the world’s up-and-coming tech communities – from Germany to Mexico to Indonesia and more – and compare them on a number of different factors, including entrepreneurial mindset, access to capital and general strengths and weaknesses:

social management blog

Matt Mickiewicz, 99designs Co-Founder—27 Years Old

Mickiewicz’s business partner, Mark Harbottle, is 37
Founded 2007
Located in San Francisco and Melbourne
27 employees, with plans to double that number over the next year
No official revenue released—“eight figures”
99designs is a hub for businesses to find graphic designers without having to do all the searching themselves
Recent acquisition of Series A funding from venture capitalists Accel Partners—$35 million
According to Matt, the United States is home to 74,000 graphic designers
99designs lists 100,000+ graphic designers
80% of the company’s business comes from word-of-mouth
77,000+ projects completed so far

Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowski, Dropbox Founders, 28 and 25 Years Old

Founded 2007
Located in San Francisco
50 employees
No official revenue released
Lets users access and share files from nearly anywhere using a file sync cloud
3 months in, landed $7.2 million in funding from venture capitalists and individual investors
The how-to video posted on Digg boosted beta waitlisting from 5,000 to 75,000 people in a few hours
Available in English, Spanish, French, German and Japanese
25 million users
1 million files saved every 5 minutes
Plans up to 100 GB of storage

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Instagram Founders—25 and 27 Years Old

Founded 2009
Located in San Francisco—Twitter’s old office, to be exact
4 employees (yes, 4)
No official revenue released
Allows photo editing in an app, along with location sharing
After it launched in the App Store at midnight on October 6, 2010, Instagram had 10,000 users in just a few hours
Now 7+ million users
150+ million photos uploaded in the first 9 months
1.3 million photos per day
15 photos per second
Flickr didn’t even reach 100 million photos until nearly 2 years after launch
16 options for photo editing
$7 million funding from Benchmark Capital
Plans for revenue: paid extra filters, exclusive accounts, advertising

Hussein Fazal and Kristaps Ronka, AdParlor Founders—29 and 24 Years Old

Founded 2008
Located in Toronto, Canada
15 employees
No official revenue released—“tens of millions”
After Facebook’s 2007 API, the pair began designing apps for fun
Along the way, they noticed Facebook didn’t have any solid ad networks
Ronka dropped out of school as the pair began coding and started AdParlor
One of fewer than 100 companies with access to Facebook’s ad API
Over 100,000 ads daily on Facebook
Over 500 million impressions

Alexa Andrzejewski, Soraya Darabi, and Ted Grubb, Foodspotting Founders—27, 27, and 29 Years Old

Founded 2009
Located in San Francisco and New York City
10 employees
No official revenue released
An iPhone app allowing people to search for food by dish, not cuisine, while seeing photographs of the meals and getting the locations of the restaurants serving it
Grubb was a programmer, but knew nothing about app development—so he learned in order to create Foodspotting
He programmed the prototype app in a tent in the wilderness!
In the beginning, Foodspotting was 1 of just 6 location-based apps in the iTunes App Store
$3 million in angel funding after highly successful run at Start-up Weekend in SF
600,000+ foods now “spotted” on the app
101,615+ follows on Twitter
Partnering with The Travel Channel and Zagat

Jason Baptiste and Andres Barreto, Onswipe Founders, 25 and 24 Years Old

Founded 2010
Located in New York City
12 employees
No official revenue released
Provides mobile website optimization for all levels of publishers
Content becomes interactive, customizable, “app-like”
Received over $6 million in funding from companies like Spark Capital and Lightbank before platform launched
Invented a WordPress plug-in specially for the iPad
Now, a deal with WP has Onswipe running 18.6 million blogs for iPad
Barreto is also a founder of Grooveshark and PulsoSocial—“TechCrunch for Latin America”

Siamak Taghaddos and David Hauser, Grasshopper Founders—Both 29 Years Old

Founded 2003
Located in Needham, Mass.
50 employees
No official revenue released
A voicemail/call routing system using its own phone number
Began with existing software, but developed their own proprietary software
Plans for all sizes of business: $9.95 to $199.00 per month
Grasshopper Group founded in 2010: will produce many products for entrepreneurs
May 2010: Created and circulated petition for National Entrepreneurs Day
President Obama one-upped them and made National Entrepreneur Week in November
Growth of 1,983% in 2007
Growth of just 5% during the worst part of the recession
However, Grasshopper is due to grow 20% on top of 2010’s revenue, with more than $15 million

Matthew Corrin, Freshii Founder—29 Years Old

Founded 2005, with seed money from his parents
Based in Chicago, with locations around the world—first location in Toronto
50+ locations in 4 countries—United States, Canada, Austria, and UAE
500+ employees
No official revenue released—est. $50 million
Custom fresh food—salads, soups, wraps, bowls—made affordable
A calorie, fat, sodium, cholesterol and protein counter tallies each online order’s total by ingredient
Aim to open 700 more stores—½ corporate, ½ franchise—in the next 5 years
To open a franchise: $30,000 up-front, 6% royalty, 3% advertising fees
Typical start-up fee: $250,000
Corrin had never worked in food service or retail before opening

Hayley Barna and Katia Beauchamp, Birchbox Founders—27 and 28 Years Old

Founded 2010
Located in New York City
25 employees
Projected revenue for 2011: $7 million
$10 per month for a shipment of 4-5 samples of beauty/cosmetic products to customers’ doors
At launch, Birchbox already had 660 members by word-of-mouth!
A beta test e-mail was sent to 40 friends in March 2010—and resulted in a waiting list of about 3,000
Currently about 45,000 members
Just 1 month after launch, $1.4 million seed
Accel Partners and First Round invested
Cosmetic giant Benefit was the first to join the project

Daniel Gomez Iniguez, Solben Co-Founder—20 Years Old

Founded 2009
Located in Monterrey, Mexico
15 employees
Revenue for 2010: $1 million
Projected Revenue for 2011: $3 million
An alternative energy project begun for a high school senior project
Sells technology for making biodiesel out of algae and plants, as opposed to cooking oil or animal fats
2010 GSEA Global Social Impact Award Winner
1st Place Entrepreneur Award 2010 in the Mexican Stock Exchange

So 2011 was the year that….
January: Epic life changing skype conversation
January: My son was born (first child)
March: SXSW (cofounded a startup, 2011 was special, thanks everyone!)
May: Black Enterprise Conference in ATL. (another great special event)
April: Saw Diddy Live in Concert with @iFroggy
June – August – Lived in Silicon Valley for the Summer with NewME Accelerator (Thanks Angela, startups, sponsors, mentors, and speakers)
September – Spoke at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation 2011 Annual Legislative Conference
October: Spoke at O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference in New York
October: Kanye West and Jay Z – Watch the Throne Concert with @iFroggy
November – CNN’s Black In America 4 Aired which covered the NewME Accelerator

All of 2011 = Met a lot of new amazing people, built closer relationships with internet friends and did my best to help as many people as I could.

Happy New Year Everyone!
Take a breath, pause for one second, say thank you and let’s get back to work, because we have a lot of work to do and let’s change the world!

I want to change the world
I want to change the world. I don’t want to occupy the world but change it.
When I change the world it’s not going to be how others think I should change the world or who I change the world with but my plans are to change the world.
To change the world, I have to change myself first and a lot of other things.
I have a few ideas about how I plan to change the world but they’re just ideas to change the world.
I do know that I’m not going to change the world by running for a political office or marching or rioting.
My ideas to change the world may reflect a small percent of the world and how people view a certain demographic of the world or people or view point but when I reach my goal, I will change the world.
I’m not going to change the world by myself.
I don’t know who’s going to change the world with me.
It’s not going to be easy to change the world, it never is, never have been or will be but I rather try to change the world than do nothing.
I want to change the world not for my personal gain but for those yet to live, grow up or who knows the world needs changing.
I’m not going to change the world how I am today, a lot has to change, but I’m up for the challenge to change the world.
When I do change it may happen in my life time or not but when you look back I hope you can at least say I tried to change the world.
I want to change the world for a better place for you and me… (insert “we are the world music”) I wish more people would want to change the world too.
What changing the world means to me may not mean the same to you but in my goals by you reading this means I’m already starting to change the world.
I have a lot to learn now, before and during trying to change the world but I’m up for the challenge.
Some of you are not going to like me while I’m trying to change the world.
While I’m changing the world I’ll look at how it impacts individual minds, our society, and our culture.
I don’t want to change the world just my way or your way but hopefully in a better way.
I don’t see changing the world as having a start or finish but an ongoing journey of goals, life lessons, conversations impacting individuals to become better and reach their goals even if that means one person at a time to help them change the world too.
Thank you to the people who have changed my world who have enabled me to help change the world.
I hope you change the world too.

Quote: Steve Jobs
“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith”

“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. ”

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

“Stay hungry and stay foolish”

To be continued…

About Guest Author: Victoria Kushner is a blogger and PR manager at Freemake.com. She writes about top multimedia apps and tech startups.

Nowadays everyone is talking about word of mouth promotion success. Viral marketing is a promising method, especially for small business and new companies. As matter of fact, viral campaigns bring substantial traffic, attract new audience and help build warm business-friendly atmosphere. Each business owner dreams about vast public support and good attitude to his/her startup.

However, many useful social media tools are still rarely implemented by small business. The reasons for such viral marketing reluctance are lack of knowledge, fear to fail or viral concept misinterpretation. Let’s dispel myths around viral marketing and explore 3 real viral growth cases that every business owner may apply to own company.

Cool Infographics

Infographics is a powerful viral tool. People love to share it. You can see thousands of Twitter updates with word “infographics”. If you plan to boost your company name mentions in social media – design impressive infographics.

First of all, you need thoroughly research your industry-related topics that may be interesting to wide audience. Visit such popular infographics galleries as visual.ly, Killer Infographics, or Daily Infographics and view ready infographics for your niche.

Then, work out ideas and connect them with your company product/services. Hire a designer and make your infographics dream come true.

Next step is to place your excellent infographics on your website and supply it with social sharing buttons. Don’t forget to promote it among your existing customers via newsletters, Facebook, Twitter feeds or offline announcements.

After that pitch bloggers and suggest your slide for magazines. If you target right journalists and make appealing image, people will talk about it. For, instance, “YouTube Killed TV” infographics has numerous tweets that reached people worldwide.

By Freemake, proud developer of YouTube Converter

Great YouTube Video

For complicated products or services, just an infographics will not do. In this case, try demo or promotional video. There’s no need to hire Hollywood producer or New York Video Agency. A video can simply show your company internal processes or have a video message from CEO. Audience is always excited to learn inside information and to meet real people who stand behind a small company.

Make your video unique, short and outstanding. Compare other YouTube videos and write compelling video title and description. Add as much information as your want. It’s important to put your website, social media links and contacts. Then, buy YouTube ads to drive extra traffic to your video channel – it’s cheap and does not require much online advertizing skills.

A vivid example of this viral tool success is Orabrush “Bad Breath” video that gained 16 million views and lots of comments.

Catchy Social Networks

Invite your current customer to join your Twitter, Facebook or Google+ pages. Offer incentives, coupons and exclusive bonuses to your social networks buddies. Logos Bible Software generated over $300 000 through Facebook promotion. They prepared custom discounts for each fan. The campaign resulted in mass social message distribution and additional orders. Follow Logos way and create active social community.

About the author: Alia Haley is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology and luxury.
Beside this she is fond of games. She recently bought a Gaming Mouse for herself. These days she is
busy in writing an article on Suzuki Motorcycles.

There was a murmur heard in the Microsoft camp a couple of weeks before about the social networking project being carried out by the company. Later these things embarked at a place called Socl.com with a name Tulalip. The fact of the matter is that Tulalip happens to be a website which allows you everything right from getting any information to sharing it unlike you see in any social networking site. With passing time, more information has emerged out now in public making things clear. Microsoft has embarked with a project called Socl and dropping the Tulalip. This place will allow you to search for information and clubbing things with a complicated blend. Microsoft has tested the applications with limited users in a group along with a number of features as discussed under:
The UI or User Interface: On the face of it, people can call it somewhere a Facebook; however, it is still too early to trust this notion completely. This can only be said when Microsoft will eventually launch the social networking website. However, at the moment you can consider having the same design of three columns as seen on Facebook. These include the updates coming in the middle section, information at the right side and the navigations links on the left side. However, the difference comes with the input area which is placed at the top side area where you can you can update about your statuses just beside the question asking to do so. However, you can choose for a standard format rather treading this path.

The Tags: The Socl is taking a different route to this path and not just replicating things from FB. At Socl you get the choice of using tags with some specific subject trying from anybody’s status or search the query; thereby you can get result of anything having this searched tag. It is still unclear how it will work while you can use your RSS feeds or just try Google as well for you. This feature is still under the phase of testing, we can have a clear idea after it comes out.

The Videos: Having the presence of high end HTML5, Socl works out without any hassle or issue even when you will see the video being used at the right side. In this way the users can therefore do two things together, watching the videos from YouTube and put comments through the chat box window.

The Social Element: As you see how Google is using the social element in its search results since they think that it can pull out information which is unique from the users using their friends. With Socl you can expect similar thing in this direction, though we need to wait and watch this thing.

Knowing the fact that the Microsoft social networking site –Socl is under test, it’s a tough task to understand it completely at this juncture. People though feel that the company will bring something different rather than mere replicating things from Facebook or any other social media site. To survive indeed you need to be different, by just being a copy cat it will make things tough for the Socl to combat the giants of Social media.

About Guest Author: Chris writes at all hours of the day and can’t stop. He is a webmaster junkie and thrives on throwing bulks of information on the web.

Facebook has been changing so many things that I can even keep up. Just like everybody else I’m addicted to this social network called Facebook. As a webmaster though, I wonder why they are changing so many things. They have us all addicted in doing what we are already doing. We all knew how to do everything on Facebook and we liked it that way. Now the network keeps changing so much that I’m not sure I’m not even doing the right things.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I think one something as beautiful as Facebook was you don’t change it. People are addicted to cocaine as a drug, are you going to try to change that.. No. Why change something when it’s doing better than it ever has and people enjoy what it is. I understand the idea everything can be bigger and better, but for a website like Facebook to do what it did is breathtaking.

With such a beautiful artform, I would not change it for the heart of me. So I guess this is me somewhat ranting on how I hate the new changes in how they even think about keep changing everything. I really disagree with how they change things and now I don’t even know how to use Facebook.

If you go all the way back to the my space age, this is basically what is happening them. They kept changing everything and allowing spam and HTML to no limit and now they do not even exist on the platform. Do you want to become a MySpace? Facebook was simple and easy just like a textbook. Now it’s integrated like a viral network.

I’m adjusted to see who has to say what on the new Facebook and how you feel about the changes they keep making.

Source: http://frugaldad.com

Guest Author:
Nancy Evans is a freelance writer that specializes in technology and business.

New Years Eve is just around the corner, and for many that means trying to come up with a list of this year’s resolutions. It seems like every year, nearly everyone you know comes up with a long list of resolutions designed to make them a better person only to have many off those resolutions pushed into nonexistence or rolled over on to the following year’s list.

While resolutions aren’t always easy to stick to or achieve, there are several ways that technology can actually help you stay true to your goals. The apps available on smartphones and tablets have become increasingly helpful when trying to better organize and manage our lives, and there are a few apps in particular that can make adhering to your New Year’s resolutions, even those hard-to-do ones, much easier and even rewarding. Such apps include:

LunchMeet
For those who are wishing to become better connected in the professional world in hopes of finding the job of their dream or to simply find a partner for a business venture, LunchMeet is just the app to have. LunchMeet connects to LinkedIn and allows professionals to meet with one another face to face in their available locations. Through the app you can locate other professionals of interest and list your location as well as any time you are available. You are then free to contact others which may just land you that job you always wanted – because as we’ve all heard, it’s not what you know, but who you know.

Mint
If you have found yourself surrounded by debt over the last year, your New Year’s Resolution probably has something to do with paying off those credit cards and loans. If this sounds like you, then Mint is your app. Mint automatically syncs all your bank accounts and other financial information, such as installment loans and credit cards, to help you monitor all of your spending in one easy-to-use place. The app will let you know where you are spending too much, and will also let you know when you are going over budget – making sure that you are spending and saving in all the right places.

Today’s Plate
Maybe you have got the job you’ve always wanted and your feeling financially stable so those two resolutions, which are at the top for many, don’t have a reason to make your list. Instead, however, you are growing wearisome of the spare tire sitting around your waist. There is no other resolution that makes the New Year’s lists more than losing weight, and for those who are finally serious about shedding those extra pounds, Today’s Plate is for you. One of the predominant reasons why people struggle with losing weight is because of their diet. With today’s plate you can keep track of all your calories on the go. The app even calculates restaurant meals so that you can always keep your diet in check ensuring that you will get that thin body after all.

MyQuit Coach
MyQuit Coach is the serious app for those serious about quitting smoking – which is a common New Year’s resolution for thousands of Americans. MyQuit Coach offers a personalized and highly customizable plan for quitting smoking, and will help you stay on track by alerting you to how many cigarettes you should be smoking a day in order to reach your goal. The app will even award you badges for quitting milestones, and will also tell you how much money you have saved to date by not smoking.

Quitter
While MyQuit is a little bit more intense as far as quitting smoking apps go, Quitter makes quitting, well, a little more enjoyable. The app provides you with a count of how many days you have gone without smoking, and congratulates you for reaching certain milestones. Instead of a coach, it is more like having your own personal anti-smoking cheerleader.

Following through with those New Year’s resolutions isn’t always easy, but thanks to a few selected apps, it can sure be a lot easier. Now if only one of those apps could actually create your New Year’s resolution list for you, you’d be golden.

Google Doodle Happy Holidays Song Video

I say ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Happy Holidays’ to a person based on their appearance. Some call it profiling. I call it living on the edge.

— Andy Richter (@Andy_Richter) December 23, 2011

Alia Haley is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology, health and parenting. Beside this she is fond of eating. Recently an article on Nokia Lumia 800 attracted her attention. These days she is busy in writing an article on Racing Games For Kids.

Have you ever come across deals like discount on purchase for a copy of a tweet or for liking a Facebook profile of a company? What could happen if you like Dell’s Facebook profile to Dell in reality? What is there for Coke to encourage Facebook profile? These are at the end of the day only intangible and binary signals confined within servers and networks. And answer is web 2.0 or interactive capabilities of today’s World Wide Web. User generated content is becoming tools for marketing in both B2C and B2B segments.

But who and why should spend?
All most anybody willing to draw public attention can spend – Barrack Obama did it in presidential election and Ford do it for their cars. Social media allows companies, organizations to spread brand awareness and increase customer engagement.
Companies spend millions of dollars on market research activities every year. But social network sites and forums provide endless opportunity to interact with customers and to understand their psyche at fractional cost. Besides, you can earn commitment if engage the customer around the branding activity. Reviews and remarks generated by customers work as marketing content for other left out prospects and customers.

Budgeting
But even a deep pocket corporate also needs to budget its spending. And despite so many cost efficient benefits it’s not easy to budget social media optimization. Part reason is lack of effective parameters that link money spent to money earned directly and the other part is slow action of optimization initiatives.
Other than budgeting, another common problem with SMO is how to distribute the allocated fund. Too much stress on campaign eats up fund for customer engagement process. This results in less than expected return on investments.
For these reasons, often companies drag their feet when budgeting for social media marketing. Even most willing marketing officers often suffer from over-budgeting or under-budgeting. To avoid such problem you can try few useful tips to streamline your social media initiative.

Separate budgeting
Make separate budget for different activities like, campaign, customer engagement, customer care etc. And don’t let one activity to eat up fund allocated for other activities.

Activity planning
We all know social media is a very fast changing medium. But for proper budgeting and fund use you must have a plan for future optimization strategy for near future. This would help you to allocate fund properly.

Introspection first
What worked for Ford may not yield for you. Try to understand your customers, prospects and brand reach. Every brand has its niche and it is important to understand that before you plan your strategy.

No magic
Social networking sites don’t give you any magic wand. It is absolutely legitimate if you find social media not much promising for you. You can restrict yourself within digital marketing only.

Wise parameters
Be wise when deciding on what test parameters to use to check effectiveness of your media effort. Try to rely less on paid media and stress more on earned media. Millions of followers won’t earn you dollar if they don’t shell out money to buy your product. Try to build and nurture even a small base of engaged followers.

CMOs must understand time is the most valuable input to skim optimum benefit from the social media marketing. And how much time you can afford would be major determinant of your budget. How much to spend is not important in SMO; what is most important is how long you can afford to spend. So, be careful to spend evenly across a long time horizon for better brand engagement and sales conversions.

Are you into gaming or mobile or social gaming or earning rewards or all of the above? If so you’re in luck as playd iPhone and Android apps are now available for you to download on both the iPhone app store and Android Market place. Playd allows you to you rate, share, and discuss the games you love with your friends!

In an email sent last night Playd founders say:

I’m proud to announce that Playd is finally born! We spent the entire summer building and collecting feedback from you guys and now you can see it in action. As gamers our work is never done. We are forever working on new features and partnerships to offer you guys the best experience.

Playd app features include verified check-ins, real-time game channels with your friends and tokens. With tokens you can earn you free swag, discounts, DLC, and more! Here are a few Playd screnshots.

For more about Playd visit: http://playd.it or follow @getplayd on Twitter.

Disclaimer: Anthony Frasier, @AntyonyFraiser, cofounder Playd was one of the startups that participated in the NewME Accelerator. BlackWeb 2.0 and NewME Accelerator are owned and operated by Black Web Media.

Also read: Anthony Frasier and Tiffani Ashley Bell are the new face of Black Startups

Have you downloaded and “played” Playd? If so let us know what you think about the app in the comments below.

Any surprises? I have one…. Kardashian?

Social media has already been firmly established as the new paradigm of electronic communications, and in 2012 it is expected to become even more prevalent thanks to the rapid development of mobile applications which will allow us to constantly receive update in real-time, wherever we may be. Online social networking is moving towards an “always-on” model; an efficient way to be tied-in to the people and organization that matter most in our lives.

Smarpthones are the new de rigueur electronic platforms for receiving social media updates. Twitter, the leading short messaging and micro-blogging social network, is constantly being redesigned to improve user experience on mobile devices such as an Android phone or Apple's iPhone. Other popular online social media platforms like Facebook and Google+ are also experimenting with different new features for their mobile apps that take full advantage of the improved functionality of smart handheld devices.

Both Apple and Google are engaged in a veritable arms race for mobile operating software (OS) dominance. Apple's iOS 5 and Google's Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich Android recent upgrades were focused to accommodate the advanced multitasking capabilities of smartphones and tablet computers. Both mobile OS platforms are centered on the idea of social media being keenly integrated in users' lives. The ability to receive and create social media updates is taking center stage in the new mobile OS offerings and their third-party apps. Thanks to the vastly improved hardware features in video, audio and connectivity, users of the next-generation mobile devices are poised to become the most prolific group in terms of contributing social media content.

Internet and software giant Microsoft is also actively engaged in transforming its ubiquitous Windows OS into a premium platform for providing a rich social media experience. The upcoming Nokia Lumia lineup of Windows-powered smartphones promises to be a solid contender in mobile social networking. Microsoft's social media strategy is not limited to its partnership with Nokia. The company's next iteration of its flagship OS, Windows 8, is being developed with a strong social media and cross-platform functionality in mind.

Disclosure: Sponsored post

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to background checks. She gives advice to entrepreneurs for the leading business directory, Business.com.

Photo Credit lyntonweb.com

To get straight to the point, I think Meta Keywords are annoying. For those who are unfamiliar, as you create and design your website you will be prompted to insert Meta Keywords. These keywords, words that are most relevant to describing your site, are hidden from the public because of what we call Meta Tags, or pieces of code seen only by search engines. The keywords are generally placed between the HEAD tags in your HTML code, and each keyword is separated with a comma. The idea is that these keywords will help your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

Believe it or not, most people I talk to also find these keywords annoying, and many are now saying that they are completely useless. However, these Meta Keywords are easy to type into your website or your article, so businesses have been filling in these blanks since search engines become popular ten years ago. Although it only takes two minutes, there is no sense in bothering, even for two minutes, with something useless. If you are going to do something for your website, it is important to know what the benefit is (if there is a benefit at all), regardless how long it may take. Consider the history of these Meta Keywords and how their role has evolved over the last ten years:

Meta Keywords Then and Now

In the 1990’s, it worked like this:
1. A website would place these keywords on their site to signify its main and relevant topics
2. Search Engines would then use meta data to classify and index a website
3. A website with correct meta elements would then rank highly in search engine results

Today, the Meta Keywords work very similarly, but with one major difference:
1. Business owners place these keywords on their site to signify its main topics
2. Businesses began to take advantage of meta keywords, and sites then began to appear in unrelated search engine results
3. Major search engines no longer use keywords to classify or index a website

Now that the biggest factor, Google and other search engine page rankings, is no longer, many businesses are wondering whether or not Meta Keywords are worth their time. Although it is simple to add in Meta Keywords, the whole concept can be a bit confusing to a startup company or employees new to the SEO world. At first glance, most would say these keywords have lost their value. After all, Google is the end goal for an SEO director. However, there are a few reasons that these annoying little words are still worth your time:

Google Doesn’t Want Them, but Meta Keywords Are Here to Stay

• Smaller search engines still use Meta Keywords

It may seem like Google and Bing rankings are the only way to get ahead, but many companies are realizing that local search engines also bring in business. After all, creating dishonest keywords was worth it for companies looking to rank on Google, but now that this is no longer available, smaller search engines have nothing to worry about.

• Directory sites still use Meta Keywords

Directory sites often use these Meta Keyword tags to help categorize your website. These sites will need to know where to index your site, and they are more likely to do so if you make it easy on them through Meta Keywords. Think of it as a document management tactic for directory sites. In other words, your site will appear much more often in directories when compared to sites without Meta Keywords.

• Meta Keywords work well for internal uses

Tagging specific keywords works well when it comes to documenting each page. As your company grows, your pages and your team will likely expand. If you have a Meta Keyword in place, future employees looking to develop pages will know the goal of each page exactly.

• Preparation if major search engines ever go back to the Meta Keyword system

This is unlikely to happen with Google simply because they have new algorithms for ranking pages, but it could very well happen with other major search engines. If done correctly, this system is an easy way to help index a page. It only takes a few seconds to set up a keyword tag, so it can’t hurt to get ready for the unexpected.

As I said before, I will be the first to admit that worrying about Meta Keywords is a bit annoying. However, once you know that this habit has positive effects, you can begin to think of these keywords as just another way to increase popularity in your company. Although they may not yield quite as obvious results, they cannot hurt your company. In other words, they are still worth the extra two minutes.

Lisa is an avid yoga enthusiast who enjoys writing in her spare time for Usdirect.com – home of USdirect.

I love music. Unfortunately, the only thing I know how to play is the radio. My husband sings, my daughters play the piano and my son not only beat boxes, he can hear a song twice and sing it back to you in key. Makes me sick.

On the other hand, I also love technology, which can help you look more musically talented than you really are if you know which programs to use! Personally I believe everyone can make music, and everyone should. So here are some brilliant applications you should consider if your interest is in music, but your talent isn’t.
Ocarina. One of the top 20 selling Apple apps of all time, Ocarina will have you making incredible music in moments. This amazing application uses the microphone on your iPhone to create a wind instrument. There are several ways to create music:

• You can hold down each of the four “holes” on the iPhone to create the pitch (or combinations thereof).
• You can change the way you hold the iPhone by tilting it and change the depth and vibrato rate.
• You can even change the key.

Another fun aspect of this app is Ocarina’s user community. There are over 2000 user-generated songs you can learn with cool finger charts to show you how to do it. Just plant your fingers and blow! When you’re ready, you can name your Ocarina and allow other people to listen to you play, from all over the world. Want to listen to what other people are playing? Then just tap on the globe icon!

Magic Piano. Makes playing the piano and sounding like a musical prodigy virtually effortless. Created for the iPhone, you can now take music with you anywhere, and with it, the ability to spin your own versions of popular songs. Magic Piano is fun and easy to learn, because all you have to do is follow the beams of light. It’s that easy to sound that great. By the way, Magic Piano is FREE!

I Am T-Pain. Want to sing instead of playing an instrument? Then show off your amazing vocals with I Am T-Pain. Use it with your headphones or plug your iPhone to an external speaker and sing away. This powerful app applies the T-Pain vocal effect as you sing! You heard correctly: this uses the same correction technology used in professional studios, now available in the palm of your hand.
GLEE. Another fun option is the #1 music app in 21 countries: GLEE Karaoke. It’s FREE, it’s incredibly enjoyable to use and it lets you strut your stuff. The app has pitch correction with a little taste of reverb, so you’ll sound, well…better than you actually do. Made for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, GLEE allows you to sing along with any song you have in your iTunes library. You can even join into someone else’s performance and add your voice to theirs! One feature I find especially fun is owningmy own radio tower from the app itself. Share songs on Facebook and Twitter and once you’re ready for the big time, compete in weekly contests to win free songs.

Magic Fiddle. Want to show off your sophistication? Mashable says Magic Fiddle is “…pure, unadulterated musical awesome.” I couldn’t agree more. This brilliant app teaches you how to bow, pluck, vibrato, trill and glissandi right from your iPad. Give yourself and hour or two and you’re sure to blow away your friends and family. You can share your experiences with other enthusiasts around the globe as you perform like the masters. The fiddle shows you all the right notes and gives you a piano accompaniment to show off your new found musical genius. Heck, I bought it just so I could say “glissandi” more often.

Kimberly Dillon @prettylittleceo is the founder of House of Mikko, @houseofmikko,where she manages Marketing and Product Strategy. She founded the company to address the challenges that women, specifically women of color face at the beauty counter. She has been featured in TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb, named by Huffington Post as one of 25 Female Tech Founders to watch, and is a member of Women 2.0.
She started her career as an IT Consultant with Accenture and has over 8 years of marketing experience in the digital and consumer space, including a stint at Procter & Gamble. She has 2 undergraduate degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and an MBA from the University of Michigan. A lover of all things beauty, she won’t leave home with out eyeliner. Ever.

About TEDx?
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized. (Subject to certain rules and regulations.)
At our TEDxBayArea events, TEDTalks videos and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connections in a small group setting.

TheSocialGeeks Episode 41 – The Right Path

Join Caleb Elston, Robert Murray, Chris Miller and myself as we have great conversations around:

• Facebook buys Gowalla.  What was the real purpose?
• Is Path.com the new mobile app to beat?
• If you have a whim to do something, Whim is the mobile app you need.
• Are we too far ahead of the adoption curve of the normal user?

TheSocialGeeks is part of Spiked Studio Productions

Download | or Click Here to listen.

Paul works in the marketing department for CliqStudios, a cabinet manufacturer that sells white kitchen cabinets and more factory-direct, and is a blogger and Apple fanatic.

We all know of Google’s dubbed “Facebook killer” called Google+ that has, in fact, failed to kill Facebook. We also know that the success of Google+ is also highly debated. Sure, it sports over 40 million users, but only a fraction of those users actually remain active. In contrast, as of last September, Facebook has over 800 million active users worldwide.
So, what went wrong for Google+?

From the outset of its beta, the primary selling point of the service was its almost too simple way of organizing your friends into Circles so you can share specifically and privately with only certain people. Circles was meant to be a means of one-upping Facebook’s lackluster and underused Lists feature.

However, Circles is by no means perfect, and the way it’s intended to be used is somewhat laborious. Using Circles is a manual process and requires you to drag and drop your friends in a variety of friend categories that you’ve created.

The problem is that friendships aren’t one or the other, and are constantly changing. Google+ can’t keep up with your life outside of your interactions on Google+, and thus requires you to continually evaluate your friendships and manually change them on the service.
If you think about it, most people wouldn’t bother spending the time to organize their friends into super specific categories, let alone keeping the Circles organized and up to date. This, basically, then renders Circles useless.

Shortly after Google+’s release, Facebook announced Smart Lists, a feature capable of automatically grouping some of your friends. For example, it creates Smart Lists for people you are related to, places you work, and for where you are currently living.
What’s more, and what is the most important part of Smart Lists in terms of updating relationship and organizing friends on a social network, is its ability to dynamically update. If a work friend leaves for a new job, he is automatically removed from that List once he updates his employment. Facebook is showing that developing better ways to categorize your friends without you having to think about it is important for its users.

Therefore, rather than Google+ requiring its users to manually update their Circles, Google should start to give Circles some artificial intelligence capable of evaluating and updating for you. While there’s not a way that I’m aware of for Google to know every detail of your life, there must be a way to analyze your behavior and interactions across the site to do this. I don’t know what that is, but I’ll leave it to the developers to figure out.

What do you think about Google+’s Circles? Do you use them? Do you constantly update them? Please share your opinion.

While in California for the summer I met two yobongo friends offline, Emmanuel @jewgonewild and Ben @benbinary who were  just getting started working on a new iPhone app to make it easy to invite your friends when going out. The app was called Whim @getwhim on twitter. Yesterday Whim launched in Apple’s App store [iTunes Link] . It’s great to see the progress that Emmanuel and Ben have made since the summer.

At it’s core whim allows you to do the following:

• Quickly share plans with friends
• See what friends are up to
• Find places to go, together
• Stay connected with real-time chat

Take a look a whim via the screenshots below.

Whim joins the growing trend of new apps to invite your friends to locations vs letting your firends know where you’re at after you have checked into a location. I all it “friends availability around location discovery”.

For more about whim visit: getwhim.com .

Congrats Emmanuel and Ben!

Have you invited your friends on a Whim yet?

Software developer, entrepreneur, and general geek, Chris is a vocal and omnipresent figure in Cambodia’s burgeoning hacker community. Chris has founded or partnered in several software startups which are proud to have built their products in Cambodia and sold them globally. Chris is an active member of the Barcamp movement, attending and speaking at events across the region, and is also a founding member of the up-and-coming Phnom Penh HackerSpace. Chris’s vision is for Cambodia’s software sector to leap-frog its neighbors by skipping IT outsourcing and moving straight to product-focused startups fueled by the entrepreneurial spirit that Cambodia has in abundance.

Hat Tip: Carla Mays from Building While Brown West Facebook Group

TEDx was created in the spirit of TED’s mission, “ideas worth spreading.” The program is designed to give communities, organizations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level.

Rebecca is blogger by profession. She loves writing on topics related to luxury and fashion. Beside this, she is fond of books. These days she is busy in writing an article on celeb on beach.

Controlling a computer and accessing it remotely is required to stream down the important data from a system to an iPhone. It helps the work to be done conveniently as the user wishes. Google has launched an application named “TelekinesisG” to access a mac system remotely from an iPhone. Controlling a mac from an iPhone is different, interesting and new. It helps in streaming music, videos, browsing important files, performing online searches, performing mouse clicks, running apple scripts, taking pictures in the icamera, entering text in the system using an iPhone. This application is really helpful and simple to work with.

By following the below mentioned steps, a mac can be controlled from an iPhone:
1.From Google code web-site, an iPhone remote needs to be downloaded.
2.Set the price option as “Free”.
3.Install iPhone remote after it has been downloaded.
4.Click open iPhone remote.
5.Create a login id with required password.
6.Go to apple menu in the iPhone.
7.Select System Preferences.
8.Select Network.
9.Select the network connection on which the iphone works from the pop-up menu.
10. Click on the Tcp/ IP tab.
11. An IP address appears.
12. Go to the iPhone and launch Safari.
13. Enter the IP address as :5010. For example, if the IP address found comes to 192.22.22, enter it as 192.22.22:5010.
14. Enter the user name as password created earlier in the iPhone.
15. A set of icons are displayed on the iPhone screen.
16. Click on the icon you want to access.

The mac can be controlled if the internet connection is active on the system and the iPhone as the iPhone depends on the IP address to access data from a mac. The controlling can be done when there is no Local Network connection. It requires being aware of the external IP address. After getting this IP address, the internet router can be set to pass the external traffic and thereafter, it can be connected to a computer. When iPhone remote is not required to be in use, it should not be launched. It helps to retain the security of the iPhone as it disables other sources to access the mac. Despite the inventions of this Telekinesis and other applications, at times the remote controlling does not happens. It can be blamed to the application crashes that happen in the system. Sometimes, the iPhone and system do not support the Telekinesis application.

This has been considered as a useful technique to access the mac remotely as it serves many problems to be solved easily without sticking to the computers for a long time. It helps to work and fix the important issues whenever the user gets leisure time. It does not require to transfer and to store everything in the iPhone to work with. It only accesses the files and after working on those files, it is again saved in the computer. Eventually, it is proved to be time saving and comfortable way of performing the tasks.

Francis Santos is a writer and blogger for Benchmark Email and can be found on Twitter.

A few months ago, internet users suddenly found a big black bar across their browser windows whenever they accessed Google’s services. Standing out in stark contrast to the gargantuan corporation’s usual light colored palette, this bar became “Google Control Central.” This was the first step in a comprehensive effort to harmonize all of Google’s far-flung serviceswhich range from search and translation to email and social networking.

Blogger users should now identify themselves
This harmonization recently extended to the untold millions of users on Google’s über-popular Blogger site. A pop-up field on the Blogger In Draft Dashboard holds out the promise of accessing future Google+ social media features. However, the blog writer has to switch out their current Blogger site profile with a Google+ one. From then on, any social connections would have their blogs appear in Google search results along with an annotation that the writer shared it.

With this announcement came a footnote that this new integration facility would not be available to any writer who is currently using a pseudonym. This policy provoked considerable oppositionfrom a wide range of users, not just on the Blogger site but also on Google+ itself.

Google+ is integrating with Blogger but not all users are thrilled.

Many hesitate to use their real names
Google seemed to forget that their users are located all over the world, including the 42 nations Freedom House claims have repressive governments. Therefore it could be understood that Cuban, Iranian, or Tibetian citizens wishing to even mildly criticize their leaders might be hesitant in linking their real name to their comments.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Googlization of Everything states that that “we are Google’s product, not its customers”. That was clearly evident when Google+ first launched and the admins went into “seek and destroy” mode. They erased thousands of profiles because they suspected that the name on the profile was not the user’s “legal name.”

Bloggers have received death threats
For many of the users of the Blogger service the real name policy also presented a clear obstacle. Bloggers don’t have to be in Third World countries to receive credible death threats, as some in North America and Europe have. There are a number of reasons why an online writer might want to remain anonymous in perpetuity. They might have been blogging for years under a pseudonym and could confuse their readers when they found that their habitual read of TheCreepingGecko’s blogs were now being written by Mr. Bartholomew Featherstonehaugh. Or perhaps they had made some deprecatory remarks about clients or co-workers that they did not want to be personally identified with.

Google changed its policy to allow nicknames
The real name debacle is a primary reason why Google users everywhere welcomed the official announcement that the policy had suddenly changed. Google will soon allow users to maintain their anonymity and chosen public identity on Google+ and Blogger. However this is not the only worry Google users have, as participating in the services offered by the web juggernaut can lead to some very unpleasant results.

Google shuts down all access to violating users
An underage user in the Netherlands signed up for a Google+ account. As soon as the Googleplex discovered that the boy was three years younger than the minimum allowed, they not only just deleted his new social network account but all of his Google services. In a single action, Google shut down his access to email, documents, maps, and everything else they supply.

Of course Google has the right to enforce its policies, which include prohibitions against “copyright infringement” and “publishing of someone’s private or personal information”. The worrisome question is whether any Google adult user could see years of their personal emails and precious work documents vanish because they violated the terms in any way. Perhaps they did something as innocent as posting a photo they copied from a copyrighted site, or mentioning in a post that “BTW, if you need Steve’s cell number, it’s…”

Impossible to change your primary email address
Google+ users also found a troublesome, albeit less critical quirk in their new accounts. Whatever email account they used to sign up for the service remains the primary one… with no way to change it. Alternate additional addresses can be added but the primary remains immutable for all eternity. You might have signed up for Google+ with your work email and changed jobs; got married and are no longer using your maiden name; or used one of your websites’ domain names which you’ve now closed down. If so, your “no longer applicable” primary email account will continue to be associated with all your Google services. And there’s nothing you can do about that as it’s against Google’s terms to open another account.

Google’s global search market share is 85%.
The original name for Google was BackRub.
W3 Markup Validation shows that Google’s home page has 37 errors and 3 warnings.
The Googleville Data Center uses up as much electricity as all of Tacoma, Washington.
The current market capitalization of Google is more than 12 times greater than the CBS TV network.
Google Co-Founders’ Larry Page & Sergey Brin have a net worth of $16.7 billion each.
$16.7 billion can buy you 68,940 2011 Ferrari 458 Spiders, or 282,840 houses in Kansas.
Excite CEO George Bell was offered Google for $750,000 in 1999. He turned it down.

Publicly identifying yourself can be a boon
To be fair, there are many advantages to write on Blogger under your own real name, as Google continues to be the online leader that Microsoft could have been if their internet policy hadn’t run off the rails when we were still using 2400 baud modems. Blogger is a major platform which can allow the savvy writer both an effective platform and a wide-reaching pulpit. It is far easier to identify with Mr. Featherstonehaugh than to TheCreepingGecko. Google is essentially correct in stating that the change could boost blog readership and help readers gain a greater insight into the personality and viewpoint of the writer.

Google certified as a U.S. government identity agency

Google has recently had their user credential policies certified so that they meet U.S. federal privacy and security requirements. The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace now includes Google as an accredited identity agency, which makes its services suitable for a number of federal applications.

The slow death of the anonymous web
The move to the use of real identities on the Wild Wild Web is meeting with begrudging approval by most of its users. However, many are recognizing that a network directly responsible for pumping trillions of dollars a year into the world economy needs to grow out of its “sophomoric prankster” stage and into the light of greater legitimacy and verifiability.Google is leading the way to this future of near-universal identifiability where the internet will be less anonymous and by extension, perhaps tamer.

What is your opinion on the legitimization of the web? Please join the debate by entering your comments in the box below.

startupquote:

The most dangerous poison is the feeling of achievement. The antidote is to every evening think what can be done better tomorrow.

via

- Ingvar Kamprad

I guess this is a good/bad problem to have but since the Black In America 4 showing on CNN, emails and phones have been flowing in like crazy. A lot from entrepreneurs pitching their ideas, or entrepreneurs looking for a designer, developer or just help get started (See NewME Community for help) . Other calls and emails have been from people wanting to know more about NewME Accelerator. A few have been from investors or Venture Capitalist and then there are the feedback calls and emails saying you should do this or that. In the mix of it all, there’s national media, local media, and niche media such as blog talk radio shows, podcast and more. I’m humbled and grateful to be put in the postion by NewME Accelerator and CNN.

Sadly, I can’t handel it all alone. I need a virtual assistant or something, but in the mean time I’ve changed my voice message saying please send an email for a faster response. Please don’t see this as an insult or a “I’m to busy” but just the truth. As an entrepreneur myself I don’t have set hours and I plan on keeping my phone number and email address public on this site but that doesn’t mean you should call at 2:30 AM EST and expect me to answer or at 7:30pm EST all of the time. My voice message says please send an email and I’m serious.

When you do send an email, please include the following information:

• Name:
• Company/Startup Name:
• Company/Startup Website:
• linkedin profile:
• Twitter: profile:
• Blog URL:
• Angel List profile (optional and for investors)
• The ask? (keep it simple and short)
• Deadline (if you’re on one)
• Mobile number:
• Work Number:
• Best time to call back in the next three days if necessary.
• If you’re media/press please put in the subject (MEDIA/Press)

If you must leave a voice message please leave the following:

• Name:
• Company/Startup Name:
• Email address:
• Phone number:
• The ask? (keep it simple and short)
• Deadline day (if you’re on one)
• Best time to call back in the next three days.
• If you’re media/press please state deadline time.

I’m not sure if this helps anyone but please don’t leave an angry voice message when you are making a cold call and I have no idea who you are or what you have done or what your company does or what you can offer or even if I can help you.

Let’s keep it professional, friendly and keep it moving.

Much Success!

A big thanks to Mario Armstrong for inviting and hosting the event.

Black In America 4 spoiler alert, spoiler alert! (not really)but Black In America 4 airs tonight 8pm on CNN. The subtitle is Silicon Valley, the new promise land narrated by Soledad O’Brien. The base of story about Black In America 4 is the NewME Accelerator which I help plan/organize with Angela Benton and also as a participated in as an entrepreneur. CNN heard about the project via a Wall Street Journal Article and the rest I guess you can is history. You’ll see tonight right?

The leading producer is Jason Samuels and while Soledad O’Brien is the host we spent most of our time with Jason Samuels and his crew. The CNN Black In America production crew was great and was nice to work with. I want to say a special thank you to not only Jason but to Garland McLaurin, Kim, Mark, Ronnie Stevenson IV, Henry and more.

Some of the questions I received during the pre-screening interviews were, what was it like living in the NewME Accelerator startup house, was it like a reality TV show, how much of the documentary was real vs staged. I couldn’t answer to many of those questions before last week because I was not in attendance to any of the pre-screening until Wednesday. Now that I’ve seen it I’ll say that the documentary is not stage at all and it’s 99% accurate BUT it’s also only about 10% of everything that happen this summer.

To be fair Jason Samuels wanted two hours or at least 90 minutes for Black In America 4 but CNN only gave him one hour for the show. That’s tough to try to fit everything in one hour especially when CNN recorded over 300 hours worth of footage this summer. Regardless I’m very grateful for the one hour.

With that being said, while watching Black In America 4, Silicon Valley, The New Promise Land tonight keep in mind the notes below of things you won’t see while the cameras were rolling this summer.

1. Coffee shops in Mountain View, CA – The NewME startup house was in Mountain View, CA & many of the founders worked out of Red Rock Cafe, StarBucks and the Mountain View Library
2. Three other startups in NewME Accelerator 2011 were One School, Central.ly and AisleFinder
3. The NewME Accelerator had over 25+ different great mentor and speakers. You can see them here http://www.newmeaccelerator.com/speakers-mentors/
4. Coworking – We did a lot of coworking from Citizen Space, Tagged and at the NewMe startup house
5. Black Founders welcome event. Our first Sunday in CA, Black Founders held a meetup/welcome event. Thanks again.
6. About the midway point we had a “practice” pitch session at Blue Run Ventures, with Jay Jamison. This was a big deal, Blue Run Ventures is known as where paypal was funded.
7. There were some amazing speaker dinners at the house. Two notable ones were with Tristan Walker right after his birthday and with Shellye Archambeau.
8. Mentor sessions at Tagged. It was great to see how both mentors and the founders interacted
9. Dinner with Soledad O’Brien at the NewME startup house. That was an interesting, fun day.
10. The cookouts! Hank Williams was the man on the grill. You’ll see some of that in the documentary.
11. The July 4 cookout was epic! Come on, 8 black people in one house, you know we were having a cookout on July 4th.
12. Driving… I mean a lot of driving. The house was in Mountain View and a lot of our meetings/mentor sessions were in San Francisco. Not to mention giving people rides.
13. There was a lot of trash in the house, I mean, it was.. ok you can use your imagination.
14. Dirty Dishes … we told everyone to clean up after themselves but somehow I did a lot of dish washing. #justsayin
15. Hajj Flemings after dark.. that was the saying after midnight but it wasn’t just Hajj we had some epic/funny conversations late at night.
16. Google sent various team members from Youtube, App Engine, Android and Oath to talk with us. Thanks Google.
17. Tagged, I can’t say enough about Tagged. The cofounders gave us an awesome talk, they hosted us for coworking and the closing party.
18. Pizza… that is all.
19. Keep in mind that we started planning NewME Accelerator around February/March 2011
20. Demo day was great! A big thanks to Mitch Kapor and team at Kapor Capital for hosting us. I wish you could see all of the demo day pitches.
21. Stephen DeBerry and Stephen Adams. I don’t care what color you are, if you ever get a chance to talk with either one of these guys. Value it, listen and learn.
22. The Fights! …wait. we didn’t have any fights. Sorry to disappoint you but there were a few heated conversations at times. All in the family.
23. Jason Samuels, as the Black In America 4 producer he’s behind the camera. He’s a great guy and I appreciate him reaching out about filming us for Black In America 4.
24. To be fair…I was wearing a baseball cap. Watch the documentary & you’ll understand.
25. We met MC Hammer and Chamillionaire. Both were interviewed about NewMe and Silicon Valley but it didn’t make the cut.
26. Here’s the roommate format:
Tiffani Bell with Angela Benton
Crisson Jno-Charles with Hajj Flemings
Anthony Fraiser with Wayne Sutton
Pius Uzamere (dinning room air mattress)
Hank Williams (outside room air mattress)

Please don’t read this as a dis or as if Black In America 4 is not going to be good, it’s still must watch tech tv!. A big thank you to Jason Samuels, CNN, Soledad O’Brien, all of the NewME Accelerator, speakers, mentors, sponsors and the Silicon Valley community.

Enjoy the documentary!

Reminder
Watch CNN Black In America 4 this Sunday 8pm EST on CNN and then go to your computer to watch the official after Black In America 4 online live video panel and discussion with Mario Armstrong called “Innovation Nation:Startup Success”. Join us in the live chat, google hangout and more as we’ll talk about Black In America 4, Silicon Valley and more. We’ll also take questions from the online audience. When tweeting about the online live broadcast use the hashtag #bialive. The Black In America 4 hashtag is #blackinamerica. For more information about the live broadcast visit: http://www.marioarmstrong.com/on-air/innovation-nation-the-official-live-webcast/

Vouch Demo Day Slide Deck:

Founded:
Wayne Sutton co-founded Vouch in July 2011.

What is Vouch?
Vouch is a unified platform that allows people to share recommendations of others in their networks.

The status of Vouch
I’m currently learning new programming languages to build, design and launch a beta version of Vouch by the end of first quarter 2012, along with preparing to work with the NewMe Accelerator 2012 class. I’m also working on my first book, which is about closing the digital divide.

First here is what I said,

It’s very sad, it’s 2011 and we have a black President … AND, he’s not putting no money in my pocket right now directly, so what do we got to do? Play the game to be successful

Here is what happen and what I remember, (I think) it was a long summer and that sound byte was around June 2011. Heck, I forgot I even said it until I saw the commercial. Regardless is was a warm summer night in Mountain View, CA at the NewME Accelerator startup house. One of our guest speakers was Professor Vivek Wadhwa was sharing his experiences as an entrepreneur and they were vary deep. Some of his stories were sad and shocking. Everything from his comments about getting a, quote “white boy” to be the face of our startups to his stories about his partners trying to cut him out of his company while in the hospital. It was a very, very emotional night. The CNN camera crews where on hand and I was feeling part mad, part sad and part shocked.

With that being said I believe the question and/or comment I was asked was about how do I feel right now, and/or what do I say to people why the NewME Accelerator is needed etc. I can’t remember if I was asked directly about President Barack Obama but I do know some of the blog comments and conversations I read or was told was about how some people were saying race doesn’t matter in Silicon Valley, and in 2011 we have a black President and we should fine, etc. You get the picture.

So, Mr. President Barack Obama, my comments were not anything negative directed towards you but more towards people who were/are saying we don’t need the NewME Accelerator when we know that not only do we need a program like the NewME Accelerator but we need multiple NewME Accelerators setup across the country to help not just minority entrepreneurs but entrepreneurs of all kind.

If you haven’t seen the CNN Black In America 4 commercial, watch the video below. My rant where I mention the President is at the one minute mark.

As for the playing the game to be successful part. Once you learn what the process is not matter if it’s pattern matching or referrals or living up to the Silicon Valley standards, then as an entrepreneur do what’s best for your startup that you feel is what’s right and you can live with.

Reminder
Watch CNN Black In America 4 this Sunday 8pm EST on CNN and then go to your computer to watch the official after Black In America 4 online live video panel and discussion with Mario Armstrong called “Innovation Nation:Startup Success”. Join us in the live chat, google hangout and more as we’ll talk about Black In America 4, Silicon Valley and more. We’ll also take questions from the online audience. When tweeting about the online live broadcast use the hashtag #bialive. The Black In America 4 hashtag is #blackinamerica. For more information about the live broadcast visit: http://www.marioarmstrong.com/on-air/innovation-nation-the-official-live-webcast/

One learning lesson out of all this to remember is to always and I mean always be careful what you say when media/cameras are around and when you’re upset, just be quiet… #lessonlearned

It seems CNN is going all out promoting Black In America 4. Expect to see @Soledad_OBrien live tweeting, plenty of Facebook status updates and more. Yesterday CNN announced that viewers watching Black In America 4 can pre check-in and check-in with GetGlue for limited-edition stickers.

GetGlue is offering limited-edition stickers for the next installment of CNN’s Black in America.

Before the premiere of The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley on Sunday, Nov. 13, GetGlue users can ‘check in’ to unlock exclusive stickers.

CNN anchor and special correspondent Soledad O’Brien reports that the ownership of the digital bloom is mostly young, white, and male.  For her fourthBlack in America documentary, O’Brien asks why, according to industry analyst CB Insights, less than one percent of all venture capital money went to digital startups with African-American founders in 2010 – and she profiles a unique, technology-focused “accelerator” developed to help African-American digital entrepreneurs secure funding to establish their businesses.

Reminder
Watch CNN Black In America 4 this Sunday 8pm EST on CNN and then go to your computer to watch the official after Black In America 4 online live video panel and discussion with Mario Armstrong called “Innovation Nation:Startup Success”. Join us in the live chat, google hangout and more as we’ll talk about Black In America 4, Silicon Valley and more. We’ll also take questions from the online audience. When tweeting about the online live broadcast use the hashtag #bialive. The Black In America 4 hashtag is #blackinamerica. For more information about the live broadcast visit: http://www.marioarmstrong.com/on-air/innovation-nation-the-official-live-webcast/

How to Check-in

To check-in and claim your Black In America 4 sticker go here: http://getglue.com/tv_shows/black_in_america?checkin=true#checkin Like the page and fireup GetGlue mobile apps and check-in.

Great post from Curtiss Pope, CEO/Founder of Aislefinder a NewME Accelerator startup participate about Anthony Frasier founder of Playd where he calls Anthony the new face of Black Startups. If you’re wondering why, wait until you see Anthony in Black In America 4 on Sunday. Here’s an excerpt from the post.

 

I remember going over to the NewMe startup house ,and almost each time I was leaving; talking with him about a range of things: girls, music, tech, gaming, the new things he was learning about Silicon Valley.

Over the course of the summer, I started noticing things about him:

Anthony was the only one in the house that didn’t have a MacBook Pro.

Although he did have an iPad, he never bent into the social geek pressure of having that big Apple logo emblazoned on his rig.

He is just COOL.

Ask anyone that got to know him, and this is the word that they describe him with.

Gaming is his forte.

Anthony had this ability to get people excited about gaming. Even a guy like me who doesn’t even play.

Anthony doesn’t look back.

I would say the same thing about Tiffani Ashley Bell, founder of Pencil You In except she has a MackBook Pro; in terms of coolness and getting people excited about their startup and entrepreneurship. I’m excited for the both of them. Two young black tech entrepreneurs that you’ll see a lot of in the years ahead.

While Curtis is a humble entrepreneur himself, I believe that he’s on to something big with Aislefinder and don’t forget about Chris with Central.ly too. Heck, just check out all of the NewMe Accelerator 2011 startups here: http://www.newmeaccelerator.com/startups/summer-2011-class/.

Much success to everyone!

While doing interviews about CNN’s upcoming Black In America 4 – Silicon Valley – The New Promised Land with Soledad O’Brien a few of the questions I’m often asked is what was it like living in the NewME Accelerator startup house, why go to Silicon Valley for the summer and what was it like living in Silicon Valley. It was also one of the questions that Soledad O’Brien ask me during one of our interviews.

One thing I don’t think many people know is that even though I currently live in Raleigh, NC that I’m originally from a small rural community called Teachey, NC. Yes, Teachey. According to Wikipedia in 2000, the census there were 245 people, 92 households, and 66 families residing in the town. Yes that’s the place I call home. It’s very country, I grew up cropping tobacco, working in the fields and the digital divide is very much a problem in that community even today much less growing up.

Although Raleigh, NC is a lot different from Teachey, NC there is nothing like the Silicon Valley community. Take a look at the video below of my interview with Soledad O’Brien as I talk about Silicon Valley vs Teachey, NC.

Reminder
Watch CNN Black In America 4 this Sunday 8pm EST on CNN and then go to your computer to watch the official after Black In America 4 online live video panel and discussion with Mario Armstrong called “Innovation Nation:Startup Success”. Join us in the live chat, google hangout and more as we’ll talk about Black In America 4, Silicon Valley and more. We’ll also take questions from the online audience. When tweeting about the online live broadcast use the hashtag #bialive. The Black In America 4 hashtag is #blackinamerica. For more information about the live broadcast visit: http://www.marioarmstrong.com/on-air/innovation-nation-the-official-live-webcast/

One of my favorite movies of all time is The Social Network. My favorite movie of all time is Gladiator. They are complete opposite in terms of history and action but in both various characters must over come life circumstances to achieve goals beyond what they originally had planned for their life or what other people may think their life was going in. In The Social Network you have everyone from Mark Zuckerberg doing things for attention and launching “The Facebook” , to Eduardo Saverin never imaging that his friend Mark would partner with Sean Parker to run Facebook and try to cut him out of Facebook. Even the Winklevoss twins, they thought they were on to something big and despite winning court cases in real life they are still trying to sue Facebook/Mark Zuckerberg for more money (if you want to merge movie and the real world). Also look at Sean Parker, in the movie his passion for wanting to give the VC firms the middle finger because they kicked him out of a company. Everyone from Mark, Sean, Eduardo and yes the Winklevoss had to overcome startup troubles, friendships, promises, life obstacles to still achieve success or at least try to gain success and happiness.

As for Gladiator, sometimes it’s not success but revenge that may drive you. Maximus, played by Russell Crowe after being betrayed by Commodus the son of the Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Learned after betrayal that his family killed and he was left for dead. Only to survive to slay his arch enemy to set things right in Rome. But Maximus had to become a Gladiator, fighting less skilled fighters and over coming the odds to do so.

In both movies the characters had to overcome mental and physical odds to survive. As for Mark Zuckerberg or even Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network it was more mental and having the right people around them than physical and for Maximus it was a mix of mental, physical and having a good team around him. Regardless there are days as an entrepreneur where things may not go your way. The Winklevoss thought Mark was building their platform, Eduardo probably never thought he would have to sue his friend Mark to keep his name as a cofounder on Facebook and as for Zuck.. only Zuck knows what he was doing. Maximus was ready to retire as general in the war and the next thing you know he was the enemy to Rome.

There are days where you don’t want to wake up in the morning, days where you look in the mirror and ask your self why are you doing what you’re doing. You know you’re more than a 9 to 5 and that project you always wanted to do will never get done unless you stop everything and focus on that one thing. You launch projects, companies, spend endless hours and days writing, designing, sending emails only a few months later to shut things down and start something new. You fail, fail fast and fail again. You work countless hours, you network, you pick friends and partners only to ask why those friends and partners. You want change, you want success, you want the world to be using your product, website or app. Being an entrepreneur is hard. Yet you continue. Something drives you to keep moving forward. Something says never give up or give in. Something says, wait your turn and the ideas keep coming, new people come in your life and you never look back but only forward and the rest of the world may think you’re crazy but you know something special is on the way. You know when the time is right and if you keep working things will work out. It’s there, so close, you just can’t stop. Something or someone keeps you motivated …

As for me… staying motivated comes in various ways. Here are five ways I try to stay motivated.

1. Always have a fun / simple project to complete. Once you complete it, it gives you joy encouraging you to tackle something bigger.

2. Workout and stay healthy. I’ve been focusing more on this in the last few months. It works.

3. Have real close friends who will always be honest and upfront with you and give you good advice without hidden agendas.

4. Learn something new. It could be cooking a new dish to learning a new program language. Keep learning, it will keep you motivated.

5. Take trips and walks aways from problem areas. Get up from the computer and go on a long walk and/or take a trip and get away from things to free your mind.

Good luck and in the words of Steve Jobs. “Stay hungry and stay foolish”

Also keep this in mind, as the saying goes: “If you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else.”

How do you stay motivated?

Regardless, I think it was reported that some 4 million people watched the last Black In America 3. Some are saying this is the best one yet and expecting about 5 million or more to tune in. We’ll see. With that being said, we’ll see what happens after Black In America 4 airs. Not just for my life but for those who watch, future entrepreneurs and various communities across the country. Yeah.. I’m nervous.

One thing I want people to keep in mind before, during and after you see Black In America 4 is don’t focus on the negative or what has happen so much in the past but think about what you can do to make a positive change in your life and those around you.

If you haven’t seen the latest CNN Black In America 4, Silicon Valley trailer take a look below.

Also join Mario Armstong, myself and more are hosting the official after Black In America 4 online live show and panel. If you’re in the Baltimore area join us in person if not watch and participate online. Details here: http://www.marioarmstrong.com/on-air/innovation-nation-the-official-live-webcast/

When I met Arrington twice this summer in Silicon Valley.

While working on NewMe Accelerator this summer and going to Silicon Valley there were a hand full a people I wanted to meet who were not a mentor/speaker such as Sean Parker, Mark Zuckerberg, Ron Conway, Jack Dorsey, MG and Michael Arrington. I saw Ron Conway passing through 500Startups one day and waived hello, (almost counts). No luck on Sean Parker but I really didn’t try(sorry Pius) and both times when I visited Facebook HQ, Zuck wasn’t in the building (dang). I saw Jack when I had a meeting at Twitter HQ but he was busy talking and I didn’t want to look like a crazy fanboy so I kept it moving. As for MG I saw him at the TechCruch August Capital party after the Mobile First CrunchUp. We talked and he was like, Wayne…. we met at SXSW a few years ago…. Ok MG.

As for Michael Arrington, I first met him walking into the Mobile First CrunchUp with Angela Benton. I was caught off guard cause I wasn’t’ expecting to see him and I had a “geek shock” moment. I introduced myself and said by the way I was a friend of MC Hammer. Yes, I went the name drop route. Bad move, very, very bad move. A lot of people in the Valley do this (name dropping) and I guess it rubbed off on me but don’t name drop as a first introduction/impression ever. Either way Arrington was cool and said ok, we shook hands and he had to run off. I knew later that day he was being interviewed by CNN for Black in America 4 and was hoping to have a chance to talk with him again the same day but it didn’t happen.

Arrington does know Black Entrepreneurs:

Luckily I did see and talk with Arrington again a few days later at the Google Ventures BBQ. Ironically he was walking around with a “Black Entrepreneur” and we talked about the CNN Black In America 4 interview. This time I did a better job of introducing myself. One of his first statements was “how do you think I did”, “I don’t want to look like an asshole”. My response was, Mike, I haven’t seen your interview. He seemed generally concerned about how he was going to be portrayed in the documentary on CNN. He mentioned about being asked if he knew any “Black Entrepreneurs” at the time it kinda threw him through a loop but him and the “Black Entrepreneur” he was with at the time was starting talking “lightly” how they know each other.

From there Arrington and I talked about having TechCruch host a pre-screening for Black In America 4 when it comes out. Now Arrington is no longer at TechCrunch and with the way CNN is using his quotes, good luck with that happening now. Arrington and I talked a little more, I made a few introductions to him of other “Black Entrepreneurs” while at the Google Ventures BBQ and said keep in touch.

Arrington’s foot in the mouth moment?

I know for a fact that Arrington did know “Black Entrepreneurs” before the interview, before his CrunchFund and before he invested into a few Black Entrepreneurs with his CrunchFund. Some may not be considered the traditional Entrepreneurs but I know that Arrington knows Charles Hudson, Clarence Wooten, Tristan Walker, Adria Richards (who has attended and reported from TechCrunch Disrupt, the last two years) and artist turned entrepreneurs Chamillionaire and MC Hammer, all Black/brown. Speaking of Hammer, when I first met Arrington I texted Hammer and was like, hey I just met your boy Arrington and Hammer replied Arrington is the man.

So did Arrington stick his foot in his mouth when he said ‘I don’t know a single black entrepreneur’ or did he say it to stir up controversy as some have suggested, or was he caught off guard and said what he really meant or was he being to some would say, Arrington being Arrington. I don’t know and only Arrington can answer that but that doesn’t mean at all that he’s a racist. Trust me, there were times in Silicon Valley where I was thinking/feeling am I the only one here? Heck there’s times like that in Raleigh, NC. So for Arrington to say he doesn’t know any “Black Entrepreneurs” is somewhat surprising being I know how many Black Entrepreneurs would love to have been featured on TechCrunch or may have tried to reach out, myself included. That still doesn’t mean he’s a racist or all of Silicon Valley is.

UPDATE: See Michael Arrington’s blog post response to CNN: Oh Shit, I’m A Racist

Arrington is not Silicon Valley

Still, I’m not saying I agree with Arrington and/or a lot of his comments about Silicon Valley but what I can say is that living in Silicon Valley for the summer it’s an entire different world. You can say there are not a lot of blacks in Silicon Valley or tech and be part right just like you can say that Atlanta is the black capital of USA and be part right based off of opinion, demographics and culture.

Sadly for Silicon Valley, Arrington is a loud, public figure and CNN knows that. I know that. But his comments and/statements do not represent all of Silicon Valley or Silicon Valley VCs;it also doesn’t mean he’s right. Just Arrington perspective. Media is media and always be careful what you say to media on camera and off. Some of my comments will be used not the way I like and it’s life. Lesson learned.

What I would like to see are the interviews from Mitch Kapor, Ron Conway, Jay Jameson and others who talked more about the need for the NewMe Accelerator..

The Disappointment

Back to NewMe Accelerator, CNN and the documentary. I have yet to see a pre-screening. A few friends have seen it in NY, ATL and other cities. I’ve seen the tweets, had a few phone calls but I’m clearly disappointed that so far out of the pre-screenings most of the conversation is about Michael Arrington one sound byte! I mean there was hours and hours of footage being recorded about NewMe Accelerator and the eight of us living in one house. Note there were 11 startups in NewMe Accelerator but CNN only covered the eight of us in the house. But I mean Arrington was only interviewed for two or three hours out of the countless hours of footage and sadly this is all of what people are talking about so far? The closer it gets to the documentary being aired the more nervous I get.

There were so many great things that happen this summer. I met a lot of great entrepreneurs (Black, White, Asian, Hispanic) who wanted to see all of the entrepreneurs in NewMe Accelerator succeed. I hope this story is told in the Black In America 4 documentary too. Yes, we had challenges and situations… trust me. You’ll see but there was so more good things that happen versus what I’m currently reading about and seeing online.

Where are the Black Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley?

Why the ratio of Black Entrepreneurs vs other races in Silicon Valley may be very low? There are a good number of Black Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Groups such as Black Founders and more are doing a good job connecting Black Entrepreneurs in the community to support one another.

Where are the Blacks In Tech?

There are tons of blacks in tech! Another blog post on that and how to find them later but check out http://28daysofdiversity.com for starters.

Race, gender and relationships matter in technology, in business, in life!

This is a very sensitive subject but all I’m going to say and address at this time is that race matters. I’ve experienced it, seen it, doing it, living it and have stories to tell why and how it matters. You may or may not have seen or experienced anything “racist” yourself, well…lucky you! Sadly a lot of others across the world have. In the words of Kanye West “Racism still alive they just be concealing it”.

Regardless of what you build, how smart you are, a lot of factors go into play in terms of success no matter if you’re in Silicon Valley or Raleigh, NC. Be a good, smart business person and do the best you can.

The big picture!

Let’s talk about the big picture here and why Black In America 4 decided to cover NewMe Accelerator. The NewMe Accelerator after learning that only 1% internet start-ups founders are African-American and we wanted to do the following:

Increase exposure to talent,
Connect founders to access of early stage capital,
Provide mentorship from qualified individuals,
Collaborate and build successful companies in the heart of Silicon Valley,
And most importantly, we want to…

MAKE HISTORY

It’s not going to be easy (but nothing is) and the life-cycle starts here.

The negative attention, racist comments, and more is not what I wanted to see happen.

Also read:
Arrington, Race, and Silicon Valley by Hank Williams
Why Arrington is NOT a Racist & Don’t Believe the Hype by Angela Benton

My Challenge

Have an idea… do it and don’t talk about it.
Have a vision… complete it.
Have a problem.. solve it.

Y-Combinator partner Paul Graham recently wrote an essay, “Why startup hubs work“:

If you’re in a startup hub, unexpected good things will probably happen to you, especially if you deserve them.

And it’s not just the increased likelihood of serendipity, but to do your best work, who you hang around with matters.

Jim Rohn said:

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

via Location matters for your startup « Scott Allison’s Blog.

 If TechAmerica, technology’s largest advocacy organization, would send a banquet invitation to all African-American CEOs of public technology companies, the International Business Times (IBTimes) said, the response would be so small that the tech organization would cancel the event.

Read more at More African Americans needed in technologyvia Capital Outlook.

Sharing facts
Address bar sharing (cutting and pasting a URL into an email) is 10X larger than any other type of sharing (i.e. Like button)
Sharing data in one week outpaces what the Hubble Telescope collected in its first 20 years
Peak engagement with shared content happens 2 mins after a share.
Most content is shared at 9:30 in the mornings, and on Wednesdays.
AddThis was viewed approximately 2.86 billion times last Monday. If each user viewed the page they visited for at least a second, that’s over 90 collective years of human attention that Clearspring saw that day alone.

Among most shared content in 2011
What if Everyone Saw This Facebook Status: http://front.moveon.org/what-if-everyone-saw-this-facebook-status/
Dog Mourns at Casket of Navy SEAL: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/44271018/ns/today-today_pets_and_animals/t/dog-mourns-casket-fallen-navy-seal/ (shared tens of thousands of times and clicked hundreds of thousands of times; many of the shares and clicks were thru copy/paste in the address bar)

CNN only covered the eight startup founders in the house and not all of the startups founders in the NewMe Accelerator. That was their choice not ours. The other startup founders were Chris Bennett of Central.ly, Curtiss Pope of aislefinder and David Adewum of OneSchool. There are a few Black In America 4 promo videos running on CNN currently like the one of me below.

A lot of people are asking if I’m excited about being in the upcoming Black In America 4 documentary. My response is a little but I’m more nervous than excited. Especially after reading the post called TechStars, Lies & Videotape about the TechStars Bloomberg TV show. Either way exciting times are ahead and Black In America 4 with Soledad O’Brien airs November 13 on CNN.

Random thoughts, rants, goals and dreams!

Confession:
I want to change the world. I don’t want to occupy the world but change it.
When I change the world it’s not going to be how others think I should change the world or who I change the world with but my plans are to change the world.
To change the world, I have to change myself first and a lot of other things.
I have a few ideas about how I plan to change the world but they’re just ideas to change the world.
I do know that I’m not going to change the world by running for a political office or marching or rioting.
My ideas to change the world may reflect a small percent of the world and how people view a certain demographic of the world or people or view point but when I reach my goal, I will change the world.
I’m not going to change the world by myself.
I don’t know who’s going to change the world with me.
It’s not going to be easy to change the world, it never is, never have been or will be but I rather try to change the world than do nothing.
I want to change the world not for my personal gain but for those yet to live, grow up or who knows the world needs changing.
I’m not going to change the world how I am today, a lot has to change, but I’m up for the challenge to change the world.
When I do change it may happen in my life time or not but when you look back I hope you can at least say I tried to change the world.
I want to change the world for a better place for you and me… (insert “we are the world music”) I wish more people would want to change the world too.
What changing the world means to me may not mean the same to you but in my goals by you reading this means I’m already starting to change the world.
I have a lot to learn now, before and during trying to change the world but I’m up for the challenge.
Some of you are not going to like me while I’m trying to change the world.
While I’m changing the world I’ll look at how it impacts individual minds, our society, and our culture.
I don’t want to change the world just my way or your way but hopefully in a better way.
I don’t see changing the world as having a start or finish but an ongoing journey of goals, life lessons, conversations impacting individuals to become better and reach their goals even if that means one person at a time to help them change the world too.
Thank you to the people who have changed my world who have enabled me to help change the world.
I hope you change the world too.

To be continued…

Quote: Steve Jobs
“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith”

“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. ”

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

“Stay hungry and stay foolish”

If you heard me speak at a conference or panel before a common line I will often say about why people should blog is that if you don’t tell your story then who will? Then I usually follow up with some ways to create blog topics and justify blogging and the whole social media building relationships, you can’t rely on news media etc. You get the picture.

But what is Blogging? Blogging is telling a story, blogging is sharing your opinion, blogging is reporting news and more. But at the core, blogging is writing! While being one of the speakers at BrandCamp Detroit last year, I got a chance to hear my friend Peter Shankman talk as well. He said, writing is one of the most important things you can do online or something like that. Then Peter went on to tell a few stories about some bad written letters he received. Since then I’ve been thinking more and more about how to improve my writing skills and constantly telling others to start or continue to write. Regardless let’s take a look at a few examples of how just being a good writer, blogger, journalist or just being able to tell good stories have paid off for a few people.

Recently it was announced that MG Siegler who is a tech journalist/blogger for TechCrunch will now become a partner at CrunchFund with Michael Arrington. This is a special case because of the nature of the deal being in Silicon Valley, TechCrunch, AOL, Arrington, etc but at the end of the day MG did a few things well and mainly he was a good writer and he used his writing skills to build relationships and the rest is history. The same can be said for Pete Cashmore. I remember when Pete started Mashable and now Mashable is not only one of the top tech blogs but it’s one of the top websites in the world. Those are rare cases but I have friends who have received book deals just from their blog that’s not even a three years old. Also look at Groupon, it was reported that Groupon has 70 writers on staff to help with marketing which has lead Groupon to be the fastest growing business ever. It was also reported recently that Cnet was trying to hire Nick Bilton, the NY Times lead technology writer and offered him a significant pay increase, which became news itself especially since he turned it down. Even myself, some of the opportunities I’ve had and clients I’ve been able to work with has come from me blogging, writing telling stories, my experiences online, mainly here on SoicalWayne.com.

As more digital content is being created today from videos, podcast, photo sharing apps, infographics, status updates, tweets, and more at the core of everything is writing. So, why is why writing and blogging are important? Writing can build relationships, tell stories, create opportunities and help educated others. Make time to write, get better at writing and just do it.

Since coming back from CA and co-launching the NewMe Accelerator, I’ve received tons of emails and phone calls from various entrepreneurs across the country looking to either launch a startup, launch their own accelerator or minority tech conference. You get the picture. Like I said in one of my previous post, the topic of lack of diversity in tech is hot this year and the conversation around the lack of blacks startup founders or trying to be one is even hotter.

One of the many reasons we launched NewMe Accelerator was with the hope of being examples for other like minded entrepreneurs who wanted to pursue their dream of launching their own startup. The experience was life changing. A popular question I get asked is what was some of the things I learned while in Silicon Valley. I learned a lot but one thing I learned in particular about the Silicon Valley community is that majority of the entrepreneurs, investors, Venture Capitalist for the most part are willing to work with each and help other entrepreneurs succeed. I left with the feeling that they understand the ech system, how it works and knows that if they help and support one another, communicate and provide introductions and referrals then it not only helps them but it helps makes Silicon Valley what Silicon Valley is, the leading place in the world to launch a web/tech startup. You have your few individuals who are cut throat and only care abut themselves or their startup etc but we have those everywhere.

There are programs and communities across the world trying to duplicate the Valley success. Now apply that to the African-American tech community and our culture. We’re spread out, disconnected and known via our “culture” not to work together well with others.(please prove me wrong). Going back to problem and conversation of why so few blacks in tech or black founders and the whole diversity problem. I don’t believe we “Blacks in Tech” needs a modern day Martin Luther King, Jr. or Rosa Parks, we just need to start working together and those who are working together do even more. Myself included. There are tons of resources, various niche communities from Facebook groups in California, to Meetup Groups in NY and State of Black Tech panels in DC and if we really want to help close the digital divide, create jobs, launch startups and be examples to the community and for the next generation, they’re won’t be one or two or three people doing it or leading the charge. It will be a dynamic change in the African-American culture/communities how we work together and educate each others about technology.

Part 1…

This journey has yet to really begin and I have a long way to go. More work is to be done and I haven’t done nothing.

Entrepreneurs what are your most used online tools?

via: Women Flex Big Muscle in Small Business [INFOGRAPHIC]

You can read the full transcript via TechCrunch

I want to talk about how we build things here, a little bit about the product, the work we do and the work we need to do. So, this is something I put on our Wiki a long time ago [shows slide], as one of our principles is to delight our users. But then I realized it’s more important to delight their users, which are their customers and payers. And the more we focus on that payer experience, the more we focus on really making that magical — and designing it. We win, our users win, and we get more users.

So, going back to a lot of Brian’s points, this is a big focus for us, we’re the only payments company in the world that’s concerned with design. We are all designers in this room, and that’s how we’re leading this company, through design.

So, how many of you have walked or driven across the Golden Gate Bridge? Almost everyone in the room. This is one of my favorite parts of living in San Francisco. This is astoundingly beautiful, and it’s not just beautiful because it looks pretty, it’s beautiful because of the challenge that everyone who built this bridge overcame.

So, if you go back and you look at how this bridge was built, this is what San Francisco looked like before the bridge. This was the Golden Gate. We called it the Golden Gate because San Francisco was known for gold rushes. People would come here, explore and risk everything they had to live in an environment where they might find gold, or might find work, or might open a store of some kind.

So, this is the Golden Gate, this is the fort, right on the point in the Presidio, and there’s this big divide between this fort and Marin, and a lot of people living in Tiburon and Sausalito would have to go all the way around the Bay, all the way up here to get around across the river, up by Richmond.

So, they needed something that was a little bit faster. The war was over, they weren’t using this fort much anymore, so, they decided to build a bridge. So, very simply they said we need to build a bridge here, and they got an architect. The architect had a vision, actually there are a few architects, but one person has incredibly taken credit for most of the work, which was recently rectified — it’s a fascinating Wikipedia article if you have the chance to read it.

So the architects designed this gorgeous bridge, but the problem with the Golden Gate is that this is an extremely tumultuous area, if you’ve ever sailed through this or taken a boat through this, the waves are immense. Or surfed through it, which is more dangerous. It’s a disaster, I mean all the weather of the Bay is being forced through this one single point. So, all these elements create this perfect storm of turbulence. It’s extremely deep in the middle and it’s an epic span, so this was not an easy challenge.

They got a bunch of amazing engineers, and they took it step by step and iterated and iterated and iterated. There was a lot of back and forth between the architects to make this beautiful opening into this gorgeous city that we live in. And what is possible? What is beautiful? What is possible? And that’s really what it comes down to … we want to design the beautiful and build the impossible.

And a lot of people think of design, when they hear the word design as visual, something that looks pretty. Design is not just visual, design is efficiency. Design is making something simple. Design is epic. Design is making it easy for a user to get from point A to point B.

Engineering is design. Every engineer in this room, every operator in this room, every customer service agent in this room, is a designer. Because you’re designing constantly the interaction that you have with your tools or with your users or with your customers, and you’re trying to bring efficiency and take all the thinking out of that process.

So, everything we do here is design. We always want to make the beautiful — to this point — Keith, two minutes before I was supposed to start this Town Square, told me, stop. I’ve got a mistake in my slides, I forgot to capitalize an “S”. I swear. That level of perfection is what we wanna achieve, because if we achieve that level of perfection — it’s gonna take a long time to do that, a lot of hours — but then our users see it immediately, without thinking. And that’s the important part. That’s what design is.

And look at this, this is gorgeous. I mean, just look at this bridge, it’s amazing what was achieved with resources they had in the time these folks had. Millions and millions of people go over this bridge, and one of the features of this bridge is it doesn’t fall down. Reliability is a feature. This is what Brian said earlier, availability, reliability, and staying up, that’s a feature and that’s a product, and it has to be well-designed and thought after and considered, and that’s what we’re doing.

I’ve often spoken to the editorial nature of what I think my job is, I think I’m just an editor, and I think every CEO is an editor. I think every leader in any company is an editor. Taking all of these ideas and you’re editing them down to one cohesive story, and in my case, my job is to edit the team, so we have a great team that can produce the great work and that means bringing people on and in some cases having to let people go. That means editing the support for the company, which means having money in the bank, or making money, and that means editing what the vision and the communication of the company is, so that’s internal and external, what we’re saying internally and what we’re saying to the world — that’s my job. And that’s what every person in this company is also doing. We have all these inputs, we have all these places that we could go — all these things that we could do — but we need to present one cohesive story to the world.

Brian said something very interesting to me a few weeks ago, he said, support and feedback is what our customers are telling us, and product is what we’re telling our customers. I think that’s an amazing, amazing statement. We have feedback loops, and then we speak something back, the product, this company, is what we’re telling the world.

So, on this point, ideas can come from anyone, and they can come anytime. So, we all have various directions that we want to take the company and sometimes those ideas come during a shower, sometimes they come when we’re walking, sometimes they come when we’re talking with other employees at the coffee store, and sometimes you just wanna build it — you just wanna get it done — and we want to support that.

If I want to go and create a screen saver that shows all the signatures that are coming into Square in realtime, and I’m gonna go spend the weekend doing that, and I’m gonna finish it to my satisfaction so that when I go back to the company and say look at what I did, this is amazing, this is beautiful and I’ve had a lot of fun building this. And instead of saying, you know, that’s cool but we didn’t do it as a team so let’s not use it right now. Instead, let’s figure out how to say, that’s awesome, now let’s figure out how to put it into production.

So, allowing folks to work on what they want and the strong ideas that they have at any point, and then figuring out how to build it into production, and speaking to that point of reliability as a feature. Ideas happen to individuals, they happen to groups, we should allow for all of it. We should take them all in and consider them. If we don’t act on an idea, then let’s put in on the shelf, don’t throw it away, just put it in the shelf, because we may use it later in a different way then what was originally intended. This gets us to become good storytellers, and that’s what we want to do. This is about the editorial.

As a lot of you know, this is one of my favorite magazines. [Shows The Economist] This magazine is very interesting. It’s actually a newspaper — out of London. If you look through this magazine, you’ll notice a few things. First, it has a beautiful unfolding. You open the first few pages, you get all the news around the world in brief, little, 140-character news bytes of what’s happening. You want to commit some more time, then you page through and you’ll see the briefings in half pages or pages, a little bit more on what’s going on in the world, about what you just read. If you want to commit even more to any direction or any topic that you find interesting, you can read the full articles, which are multiple pages. And then at the very back are the indicators, the economic indicators, of what various aspects of the economy are doing.

The other thing you notice about this is that there are no bylines at all, there are no names in here, not even the editor has a name, it’s The Economist, they’re building The Economist, they’re writing articles for The Economist.

The editor says, I want to write about Obama, and how he needs to step it up, it’s time. He gets 5 or 6 articles, edits them into one thing that he thinks, or she thinks, will sell the magazine and tell the best story, and that becomes the magazine. This is done with every single article that’s in the magazine. And effectively every single product and feature and aspect that we’re building to our company.

So, my point here is, this company is not going to be known by one person or by five people or by multiple people. It’s going to be known by the product that we put out. We, in the Valley, think that Steve Jobs is Apple. We see Apple and we think Steve Jobs. But the mainstream audience doesn’t know who the hell Steve Jobs is. They don’t really care. They know that the Nano works, they love it, and they want to buy the next one. They could care less what this old guy in the black turtle neck does. Square is not going to be known by me, it’s not going to be known as Keith’s company, it’s not gonna be known as any other individual’s company in here, it’s going to be known as Square.

That’s what we want people to care about, and that’s what we’re trying to push, we’re trying to push, we’re trying to push the products and the brand and our story above everything else. And if you ever see that not happening, then let’s fix it. Tell me about it, we’ll fix it. Kay will help.

So, building beautiful things, it’s not easy. You can give up easily. It’s not 9 to 5 job. This is a 9 to 5 bridge [shows new slide]. Everything about this bridge says do not cross me. First of all, I don’t trust that it’s going to stay up. It’s forcing me into these narrow lanes. It’s got this mile-per-hour limit. This does not inspire. This is not aspirational to anyone. This is not something I want to cross. This is not something I want to use. It’s not something that I look at and say, wow, that’s amazing, I mean wow, What the hell were they thinking?

And a lot of people in our industry, this is what they’re building. It’s terrible. This is the bridge I want to cross. [Shows Golden Gate] This is how I want to arrive at a destination. This is classy. This is limitless. This is inspiring. This is gorgeous. Every single aspect of this is gorgeous.

Think about all of the engineers and all of the architects and all of the people that drove rock to this bridge and their families and how happy and proud they are when they walk over this bridge and when they see this bridge in newspapers and they see it in movies and they are part of this bridge. That’s what we all want to feel. That’s what I want to feel, and I know everyone in this room wants to feel.

So, this is why design is important and this is why this coordination is important, and this is how we’re leading and building this company. So, your homework for the weekend is to cross this bridge, think about that, and then also think about how we take those lessons into doing what we want do, which is carry every single transaction in the world.

Hat Tip to @Tiffani for posting this link in Facebook

Theory 1: It’s Genetic.

Theory 2: Insomnia makes ‘normal’ careers too difficult

Theory 3: Entrepreneurs create a self-perpetuating night owl culture

Theory 4: Entrepreneurs need to focus. Night is simply more productive.

For a more indebt hypothesize see Jason’s full post Why Entrepreneurs Can’t Sleep

I list the problem factors of Digital Divide in the following categories:

1. Location
2. Access to information/technology
3. Race
4. Income
5. Gender

Per the Microsoft Shape the future infographic below the annual impact of the U.S. digital divide is 32 billion dollars.
The infographic breaks down the Digital Exclusion in the U.S. and it’s cost into six categories.
1. Healthcare inefficiencies
2. Social Program inefficiencies
3. Lost Tax Revenue
4. Increased Incarceration cost
5. Lost E-goverment benefits
6. Lost Earning potential

For more about the Blog Tree see:
The Blog Tree: New Growth. Fruit for Your RSS Feed [Infographic]
How it was made by Jess3 – Eloqua – The Blog Tree: New Growth

Note: Only blogs launched after 1/01/09 was considered

Last year I hinted around in a few blog post that I was done speaking at tech conferences for a few reasons. One being my first child was being born in January. Two, felling a little burnt out having speaking over 60 times in the last 4 years. Three, I wanted to focus more on doing what I love pre-twitter (2006) and before the web went social media crazy and that was entrepreneurship and launching my own startup. Four, being a little tired of the lack of diversity in web/tech/social, etc. Fast forward to today I’ve done most of that by only participating at SXSW 2011 and being on a panel at the Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Conference & Expo, along with co-launching the NewMe Accelerator in Silicon Valley.

Currently I’m planning a few projects and also working on my next trick. Then two amazing opportunities just opened up for me last week. One was being asked to be on a panel at the Congressional Black Caucus Conference about Social Media & Entrepreneurship. The panel takes place Friday, September 23, 2011, 1:30-3:30pm. You can follow the conference hashtag at 41stALC for updates. We’ll announce a panel hashtag soon too. Other panelist will include the following:
Chris Genteel, Google
Susan Gonzales, Facebook
Patricia Cesaire, Black Enterprise
BMaynard Scaborough, One Economy Corporation
Hajj Flemings, Gokit, BrandCamp University

If you’re attending the panel feel free to add yourself to the plancast event here: http://plancast.com/p/7loh/panel-social-media-entrepreneurship-using-technology-build-successful-business

The second opportunity is O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference in New York. My session topic is “Prepare for the 2012 Social Media Landscape and will be on Thursday, October 13, 3:15. Yep, social media. Web 2.0 is one of the conferences you want to say you have spoken at that’s on your bucket list. I’m excited, nervous and focused to delver value in this session. So if the world doesn’t end in 2012 you’ll at least know how to use social media. If you’re planning to attend Web 2.0 NY register today with discount code webny11alx107 to save an extra 20%. The code expires September 22.

I just want to say thank you to my readers, followers, friends, supporters, heck everyone who really cares. Without your support and encouragement a lot of the opportunites that I’ve had would never happened. Keep being awesome and although my inbox(email & voice) stays full and it’s hard to get back with everyone, feel free to call or email or leave a comment if you need anything.

Have a successful future.