inluminent

I’m wondering when there will be a Web 2.0 application to replace PowerPoint.
Currently there is:
Writely, the ever capable browser based Word stand-in (I won’t call it a replacement yet, but it’s damn close) that lets you create documents that need a word-processor, share them, edit them, and publish them on the web. Cool. update: [...]

WSJ: Peter Drucker on The Five Deadly Business Sins “(This article originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal on Oct. 21, 1993)” … and couldn’t be more true to this day. Peter Drucker was so dead on all the time…
The world will always be a little less right without him:
Everything I have been saying [...]

Delta and Northwest file for bankruptcy. Two in one day? This won’t be good for the markets tomorrow…

I can’t say this enough. Dreamhost Rocks!
If you’re looking for a new shared hosting plan, you really ought to check out Dreamhost.
They just started a new sale this month:
From: support@dreamhost.com
Subject: [Announcement] New! All Shared Hosting Disk Space Doubled!
Date: September 1, 2005 4:26:34 AM CDT
To: John Engler
Hey Happy DreamHost Disk Hogs!
Starting Monday we began a [...]

I just got an email from a potential client I’m in Chicago to visit this morning:
John,
I hate to do this to you last minute, but [my boss], who is the person that really wanted to see you, has been pulled into an all day sales meeting, so can we reschedule?
Thanks,
xxxxx
Our meeting is schedule to start [...]

I just read this great article over on Entrepreneur.com:
From those 70,000 catalogs sent to people who had never dealt with us before, we’d earn about $70,000 in sales or just about $1 per catalog. Considering that it cost about a $1 just to produce, print and mail each catalog, you’d be right to bet this [...]

Olivier Travers asks a good question here: Are broken contact forms acceptable?
I say no. What do you say?
And, to point out, I finally met Olivier two weeks ago when he came to visit me in Austin. I wish I could have spent more time with he and his wife.

I spent some time with my uncle Raymond last week. Raymond owns his own business - Framecrafters, and it’s quite a successful little venture. They make custom frames and framed art for retailers to sell, and do some direct to client work as well. They’re good at it, and do decently well.
I [...]

Wow.
Paul Graham, one of the original founders of the company that Yahoo bought to create their online stores for small-medium sized business, posted this article on how to start a start-up. Great read.
Pretty inspirational.

Jeremy Zawodny moved jobs inside Yahoo recently, and his post about it hit me like a hammer (emphasis mine):
“And on that note, I love the fact that I can move around within Yahoo. Many companies talk about how employees are free to look at internal opportunities, but not all of them make it easy to [...]

At the office, I’m having to define “Yield Management” as a business model.
I found a few good resources on the web by searching Google, and this Google Answer was a big help.
I found a lot of different definintions, and this is the simplest one I could find:
Yield Management is extracting the maximum amount of revenue [...]

In Lessons Learned the Hardest Way, by Going Belly-Up, Laura Randall profiles the experiences of 4 small businesses that have closed recently and offers this snippet of information:
New small businesses start every day, and fail just as frequently. About 34 percent of businesses with 500 or fewer employees close within two years of opening, and [...]

Niche publishing really isn’t just for Nick Denton anymore… Peter Rojas, the original blogger behind Gizmodo has broken out of that gig to start Engadget… a competitor to Gizmodo.
Denton still has a leg up (first mover advantage we used to call it) on individuals launching one or two focused sites on their own, as he [...]

A few links from the month:

ADHD Observations - interesting comments from a parent of children with ADHD.
CSS Dropshadows - from ALA #172.
The Lowering of Loyalty from FastCompany (great first comment).
How Not to Win Customer Loyalty from Business2.0.
Top 25 Cities in the US for Doing Business from Inc.
The Three C’s of Personal Branding from brandchannel.com.
MacRumors [...]

If you own or run a company that sells a service to people, then beware of your customer. If they feel like they’re going to get shitty service from you, they’ll probably find someone else to find the service you’re providing for them now. I say this because, if Earthlink is really shipping [...]

The public posting by Noel from a few days ago about Nick Denton ’stealing’ his work has taught me some great lessons, and might teach the rest of us a few too. I’ll try to list a few of them here:
1. Free never means free.
It’s become apparent that Noel did some work for free [...]

First, let me say, I don’t know Nick Denton at all. I also only know Noel Jackson through email (though we’ve emailed a bit for two complete strangers) and I’ve only read some of Joe Clark’s stuff online, here and there.
But, when I read this post by Noel, and then more here on the [...]

Here’s a few links to stuff I’ve read over the past month or so:

Advertising
Deciding On The Advertising Media - good pros and cons list of different advertising mediums, but leaves out online advertising
The On-line Marketer’s Secret Weapon: A Site that Works
Salted Wound : Perfect Weblog Ads
Seth’s Blog: Why Web Ads Don’t Work
Fresh Inc: [...]

A lesson from Joel on Office Design:
Bottom Line it For Me.
The monthly rent for our offices, when fully occupied, will run about $700 per employee. The build-out was done on budget and paid for almost entirely by the landlord. I suspect that $700 per person is on the high side for software developers throughout the [...]

My blog was quoted in an article published in the August 2003 issue of International Journal of Entreprenuership and Innovation. The article is called Internet Review: Entrepreneurial blogging. The full article isn’t available online, but it’s a good quick read. The Director of IP Publishing, John Edmundson, was good enough to send [...]

Well, Andy finally spilled the beans about Up2Speed becoming MarketingWonk. It’s a really funny story, if you’re interested in what’s happening with the old MarketingFix (why we didn’t go back to the original brand, I have no idea).
Read on…
Oh, and always listen to marketing professionals because they always know what they’re talking about [...]

John Gruber takes issue with Microsoft, and Outlook, and the virus issues allowed by Microsoft, in his latest article “Good Times“:
We, as a society, have decided that indoor plumbing should be held to high standards of reliability and maintenance. And somehow we�ve been convinced that indoor computing should not.
And in the follow up “Dynomite!“:
Complexity [...]

Inc.com: Pricing New Products
The subhead gives it away on this article: “Companies habitually charge less than they could for new offerings. It’s a terrible habit.”
I did that this week, I’m sure. It’s sad, but it’s easy to do. As a Sales Manager and Product Development guy, I build a product, and then want [...]

Apple is a failure. Or so says Scoble. Chuq’s got a nice anti-Scoble statement:
…if being with the “market share leader” is what’s important, then enjoy McDonalds and Burger King. Me, I had a wonderful piece of salmon last night at this place called Gardinos. It must be an absolute failure, it’s tiny, only about [...]

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been interviewing candidates for an open position in my organization. I’ve learned a lot as this is my first time to really hire someone into an organization. Here are a few thoughts and suggestions for those looking for a job and interviewing right now:
1. Make sure [...]

Last Monday, I fired an employee for the first time in my life.
It was the worst morning of my life, and the weekend before that Monday was horrible as well.
Firing an employee for whatever reason is probably the hardest thing a person can have to do, because when you’re in charge of hiring [...]

I just read this article: Safeway widens delivery of Web orders and I had to point out how cool I think it is that a grocery store is taking up the charge of offering web based order and grocery fulfillment again. I’m hoping it works out this time around, and that they don’t go [...]

Wow!
I’m amazed at Andy Bourland’s personal weblog. Not because Andy’s writing a weblog about his personal experiences, but because through his posts in his weblog, he’s essentially building his new business, Up2Speed, in the open, or at least as much as any business I’ve seen built in the open lately.
Andy’s not just talking about [...]

Here’s an example of why:
On the way home from a fun-filled weekend at a small town cook-off, the wife and I stopped in an un-remarkable corner store/gas station in small town, TX. We were really only interested in stopping for a potty-break, and possibly to pick up some refreshments.
After using the restroom, and grabbing [...]

Seth comments about Apple:
Apple is in the fashion business.
Apple is Gucci.
Apple is Calvin Klein.
Very true… read the rest of the post for the context.

Adam Kalsey wrote a great intro to small business costs in response to an article he read that wasn’t up to par in his opinion.
Adam covers things like Merchant Accounts, Secure Certificates, Marketing, Cataglog and Shopping Cart Software, and Implementation, briefly, but well.
I’d like to add a little to the marketing advice Adam [...]

I just read this article over on Ratcliffe’s Blog, where Ratcliffe expands on Doc’s ideas about an information mediary that has the power to tell company’s that you don’t want their junk mail, spam, or phone calls, but then also gets you the information you do want, when you want it. Sounds like a [...]