52 Bicycles

Mike Volpe (brother of my occasional squash partner) has a post on Small Business Marketing 2.0 discussing a 3-30-3 Rule for Whitepapers:

3 seconds to grab your readers attention, leading to
30 seconds to be engaged, such that they allocate
3 minutes to read the paper.

Neat. I think the 3 minutes is about right - white papers are approximately […]

Yes posting has been light of late - at least here. The business is going gangbusters, and I spent a week in Orlando in August at the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association. Fascinating time to be around people who put technology to work for the most pure knowledge workers in the world. I […]

Marc Andreesen has some great insight on The only thing that matters:
Hopefully a great team gets you at least an OK product, and ideally a great product.
However, I can name you a bunch of examples of great teams that totally screwed up their products. Great products are really, really hard to build.
Hopefully a great team also […]

Am a fan of Eric Sink’s blog. He’s written a book, and you can get a free electronic copy by registering to be notified of the Business of Software Conference. I’m in Boston, so can’t attend, but I registered to get the book, and I’m reading it now. Mostly essays, but good insights from a […]

Too much work, but I hope that everyone who has an interest in learning something new and working on a project for a day is either there or will stop by Devhouse Boston (actually in Cambridge, a stone’s throw from where I live!)
Congrats to Shimon, Mike, and the good people at Central [Sq.] Intelligence for […]

Marketing matters.
Discovered a cool new podcast called innovatecast. On my iPod now. They recently interviewed Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch. Arrington again annoyed me with his misread of Seth Godin’s work, and repeated the common canard that promotion is irrelevant if you have something that is “truly remarkable”.
For the record, Mr. Godin would heartily disagree, […]

In Dealing with Darwin, Geoff Moore discusses two major business models for technology ventures:
Complex Systems, in which a disruptive technology requires significant change to the way people do business, and as such is a more complicated sale, with larger sale sizes and higher cost-per-sale.
Volume operations, in which a disruptive business model provides a major change […]

I had the pleasure of meeting the future founders of Xobni at a Webinno event last year. Smart kids with a neat idea around data mining Outlook. I pointed them toward Dmitri Streblenko’s Redemption, which is a great utility (and near as I can tell the industry standard for getting around the OMG, though there are alternatives).
They […]

We’ve got a Left Coast online business celebrity saying hello on this (very very) very long tail journal, and explaining that my previous post missed his point:
I am not for a second suggesting that “software: the ability to create systems, born out of the heads of bright people, that add value for people and organizations” is going away. […]

David Hornik writes about The Softwareless Software Company, in which he essentially claims that the ability to provide a major back-end infrastructure will be the core of a SAAS venture:
I believe that a new era is upon us in the 2000’s. I believe that we have progressed from the “Computerless Computer Company” to the “Softwareless […]