Pink Purple Blue Yellow

Originally uploaded by Peter Kaminski.

Just playing around with the Flickr blog integration. This is from Peter Kaminski’s collection. I met Peter at OSBC San Francisco earlier this year. He works with Ross Mayfield over at Socialtext. I really admire what they are doing, especially with Bar Camp. Anyway, I thought this was a sweet shot, so I thought I would share.

I liked the format of the last entry, the core dump blog, let’s call it a dump blog entry. Now that’s a name people will either love or hate! Moving on, this will be a speed blog entry. My goal is to complete my entry in less than 30 minutes. Most of the time a well thought out entry will take at least a couple of hours. This is why it sometimes is hard to post, because I don’t always have that much time available.

Picking up on the theme of the Cluetrain Manifesto, where in the authors put the Internet and E-Commerce in the framework of a conversation. The esteemed Jenius puts it this way in his tagline: “The Internet’s a dialogue–not a monologue–so speak up!”

One of the bible’s for this framework is “The One to One Future” by Don Pepper and Martha Rogers. I’m slowing working my way through this fascinating book. I found a couple of things that bring this perspective into very clear focus. The first quote attempts to contrast what most marketers do by filling their interaction with a strong sell message (which we are all extremely tired of hearing and will tune out the message), the model for advertising on TV, Radio, Magazines, or Newspapers which is: “Watch my commercials and I’ll bring you this content for free.”

…for the dialogue marketer – the 1:1 marketer – the bargain will be an increasingly explicit bargain, made with one customer at a time. “Ti’m bringing you something of value, some information or entertainment that you want, and in return I want to hear from you. Tell me about yourself.”

The essence of this philosophy is embodied in four criteria Rogers and Pepper identify that any marketing communication must meet before it can be considered to be a dialogue with individual consumers:

1. All parties to a dialogue must be able to participate in it. — Each party must have the means to communicate with the other.
2. All parties to a dialogue must want to participate in it. — In most cases, this means that the subject of a 1:1 dialogue must be of interest to both parties in the conversation.
3. Dialogues can be controlled by anyone in the exchange. — Monologues are totally controlled by one party-the speaker, so a dialogue cannot be totally controlled by either party.
4. Your dialogue with an individual customer will change your behavior toward that single individual, and change that individual’s behavior toward you. — You can only be engaging in a genuine dialogue with an individual customer if you alter your future course of action in some way as a result of the exchange

I believe that the power of this sentiment extends to many other scenarios of our lives. How many conversations are you having that are monologues and how many are dialogues? Our lives are dominated by monologues that leave us feeling un-actualized, un-empowered, and vulnerable. No wonder why we seem un-enthusiastic, de-motivated, and without passion. Think about it…

Here is something new for me. Let’s call it a core dump. For the none geeks, a core dump is what happens when a computer encounters an ABEND, or abnormal end. Any one who has ever witnessed a “blue screen of death” is familiar with a core dump. In the unfortunate event that this happens, the computer will list all of the contents of the registers and the call stack (”the memory”) to aid in troubleshooting the problem. In short, this is just a random dump of things that I’ve been meaning to blog further on, but probably won’t get the chance to expand on. So I want to share (document?) them while these thoughts are still relatively fresh.

Huh?

The other day driving to work I saw a work truck from the water and sewer authority with the following slogan in bumper sticker form: “Work is sacred, Don’t touch it!” Some one once asked me if I was a linguist, because I get upset when words are used incorrectly. This was slightly confirmed by a Tickle test that I once did that was for my Intellectual Type, an “Insightful Linguist”. The driver of the vehicle is most obviously a member of a water workers union or whatever, so I know what he means. However, in our short, sweet lives there are many things that are sacred, but I don’t believe that “your job” is one of them.

Woo Hoo

I saw today that the Director of the El Nuevo Dia, Luis Alberto Ferré Rangel, has started what he calls “el primer blog de cualquier medio de prensa en Puerto Rico”, the first blog from any news media in Puerto Rico. The blog is featured under a banner that states that “El periodismo es una conversación”, journalism is a conversation. All I have to say is “welcome to the conversation! Your voice has been long over due.” I hope that this helps build momentum for our conversation and we see many other businesses, government officials, and leaders join with us.

Business 2.0 Business Ideas

It’s not every day that a smart group of people get together and share ideas for companies that they would like to see built, so they can give them money (invest in them). The current issue lists 11 different ideas that a group of venture capitalists will fund if they receive the right business plans. Here are the ideas:

1. Mobile ID for Credit Card Purchases
2. Back-Office Bank Syndicate
3. The Ultimate Online Upsell
4. Subscription PCS for Seniors
5. An even Smarter Smartphone
6. Open-Source IT Center
7. Social Networks Meet The Town Crier
8. Customer Service Over IP
9. Plug-And-Play Mobile Services
10. Home Patient Monitoring
11. A Killer App for Convergence

For me, the product recommendation, open-source IT management, and the social networking opportunities seem very achievable and realistic. What I also like this list is that it is written from the investors perspective which is invaluable, especially for non-business oriented innovators.

EnterPRize

I feel really fortunate for believing in Grupo Guayacan and participating in the current Business Plan Competition workshops. Today I attended the latest workshop Technology Entrepreneurship: A Silicon Valley Perspective with Henry Sang Jr., from HP Palo Alto, California. I’m sure that what I learned today will help guide me as I begin ramping up my entrepreneurial activities. HP is offering up their IP backlog for entrepreneurs to develop the ideas. A couple of eye-openers from the session. If an opportunity does not represent a business capable of generating more than $860 million, HP is not interested. Don’t try and hit the $1 billion dollar grand slam start-up, go for one hundred $10 million singles. I think you can continue to scale this down until it becomes achievable. Wanna have a million dollar company? Try creating 10 $100 K businesses.

…begins with the first step!

Finally, tonight I took my very first step towards becoming a Web 2.0 entrepreneur. I bought a few new domains, secured a new web host, and installed Mambo, courtesy of GoDaddy, my apologies to 1 and 1 hosting. For free, they have been decent hosts. I would of preferred Drupal, but installing Mambo was just a click away. I guess we’ll see if it is up to the challenge. Within the next year I’ll probably have to deal with leaving or moving x-cito.com and snapplatform.org. So far, all I have to say is that it will be hard to beat GoDaddy’s prices and convenience.