Everyone will love the new MacBook Air for its obvious small size and sexy nature. What I didn’t know, until watching this guided tour, is that there are actually a few new features that ship with this product that are pretty genius. The new, larger track pad and “gestures” let you do things on a laptop that were always a bit of a pain. Using trackpad, you can “pinch” and “swipe” to expand the size of an application window without moving your mouse to the application chrome as we’ve always done in the past. You can “swipe” to flip through apps that are open.
This is simply one of those things that falls in the “why didn’t anyone think of this before” category. Great job Apple.
We had a great holiday season with sales higher than expected. So, why not a shameless plug for Imagekind to showcase new artists, new content and a great place to buy gifts? The site is thriving and traffic is great. Congrats to the whole team.
Yesterday I mentioned that Curious Office made another small investment - this time in Fanzter - the folks behind a new concept called CoolSpotters. A lot of people emailed me trying to figure out what Fanzter does. The answer is that Fanzter is the development company behind CoolSpotters Probably too early to say what they are up to but I’d encourage you to go sign up at http://www.coolspotters.com, enter your email address so you can be notified of the launch.
Fanzter, an early-stage new media development start-up, has raised a first round from Richard Barton (Benchmark Capital, Expedia, Zillow.com), Second Avenue Partners and ourselves here at Curious Office, as well as angel investors from media and entertainment. Founders Aaron LaBerge and Eric Kirsten go way back with Mike Slade over at Second Avenue and you can expect nothing less than a very cool concept to be rolled out soon. In fact, CoolSpotters (Fanzter’s first big project) is one of those “cool” ideas that makes you wonder why nobody had tried it sooner.
This bad boy processing 20 petabytes of data PER DAY. By now you all know that these aren’t huge Cray beasts either. They are PCs. Crazy! A standard machine cluster node consists of two 2 GHz Intel Xeon processors with Hyper-Threading enabled, 4 GB of memory, two 160 GB IDE hard drives and a gigabit Ethernet link.
This just hit my inbox. Might be interesting for someone out there. If so, contact Halley Bock [halley at fierceinc.com]
Company: Fierce, Inc.
Job Title: VP, Business Development
Description: Description
This is a unique opportunity to be part of a fast-growing and successful leadership
development company. Fierce, Inc. is looking for an experienced, poised,
well-spoken and self-driven sales executive with a 5+ year track record of
achievement in corporate sales.
A successful candidate will present the Fierce suite of offerings to senior
executives and line leadership within targeted corporate accounts, and will build
beneficial business relationships based on mutual interests, make compelling
presentations, and close business. This is a sales role for an executive with a high
degree of business maturity.
The company offers paid holidays, paid vacation, benefits, profit sharing, incentive
programs, and employee ownership.
Fierce, Inc. is a globally recognized leadership development firm based in Bellevue,
WA and was founded by best-selling author Susan Scott. Our clients span the globe
and cover a broad array of corporations, educational, non-profit and government
organizations. They rely on us to design and deliver programs that transform
cultures and provide a common global framework for achieving measurable results.
Essential Job Functions:
1. Serves as key initiator of new business development to target medium and large
sized corporate accounts for long term and strategic penetration.
2. Independently calls on mid-level and senior-level executives and other
representatives to generate product, program, and consulting sales.
3. Diagnoses and assesses client needs. Designs and implements strategic roll-out
plans using the full range of existing or custom Fierce content, products, and / or
programs.
4. Writes and oversees effective business proposals.
5. Closes business consistently within the Fierce guidelines developed for product
and services mix and pricing.
6. Acquires and maintains expertise on the Fierce suite of offerings.
7. Designs account strategy and business development to develop new and existing
accounts.
8. Develops and executes on marketing and management plan to meet and exceed monthly
revenue targets.
Requirements:
Five+ years experience in corporate sales, preferably in a professional
services environment selling to Fortune 5,000 companies. A stable work
history and track record of personal sales performance in a large corporate
environment is essential. You must have a consultative sales background and
demonstrate skills in the core areas of relationship-based sales, building solid
pipelines, working a forecast, aggressively prospecting, and efficiently driving
opportunities to closure as well as exhibiting excellent personal maturity and
character.
BA/BS in business or related field or equivalent experience required. A well
developed pattern of achievement, collaborative teamwork, energy, motivation,
enthusiasm, and integrity is critical to success in this role. Very strong verbal
and written communications skills are essential; must be able to create and deliver
compelling, polished sales presentations to both line leadership and senior
corporate executives within target companies.
Now this looks well executed. Another way to view full length TV shows without having to be stuck in front of the TV. Cool. I’d like an option to view videos full screen but I do like that it’s well integrated with my existing Comcast service AND they are soon to let me control my Comcast DVR from here. This will allow me to set schedules, recordings etc direct from my PC which is fairly handy. Me like.
When people see stuff like this, it becomes all the more clear why Comcast recently pumped some money into a P2P delivery technology like GridNetworks. At some point, people want to see HD content from the web and existing web plumbing just isn’t going to like the masses sucking down 2MB streams of Desperate Housewives. Will Comcast one day offer their own branded P2P download for HD streamers? I vote yes. Give it another year. As an adviser to GridNetworks, I know the P2P technology space is crowded but I also know that whenthese big cable and media companies use their marketing muscle to get the mainstream audience to start consuming this fat content en masse then we’ll all be running “helper apps” on our home media servers.
My wife knows this about me. I have a strange fixation with eliminating stuff. I can’t concentrate if there is clutter. Couldn’t even do my homework as a kid if there was junk lying around. I don’t know why. Truth is, I never miss anything I eliminate. Never have! Not once. If it is there in the background then it is consuming mental cycles that I can apply to something else…including relaxation. In 2008, toss EVERYTHING you don’t think you can live without. Those old hard drives. Old sticks of memory. Old copies of software. Old manuals for Photoshop 7. Old monitors. Old files on your computer. Features you you always thought would be “nice to have” but not essential to your project. Getting simple is rather hard to do. Go figure.
Ever been to slideshare? It’s a cool place to share presentations. I was recently checking out this presentation called Logic + Emotion: Visual Thinking Archive and I learned that I am a “Synthesizer”. A synthesizer is actually a great way to describe certain people in the tech industry. There is so much fast moving, ambient noise in this space that it can be helpful to sit between technology and marketing and be able to distill large amounts of data into cohesive recommendations.
Currently, I’m working on a new business plan. This is of course different than saying, I’m going to start a new company. That may well be the case but in my view, a business plan is really preliminary research wherein you have to let the data speak to you. You may not always like what it says. This is why you often see company rig their revenue models because they were so intent on starting the company no matter what. As a synthesizer by nature, I tend to suck in a lot of industry data and relevant noise and then attempt to distill all of this down into two primary buckets.
The first bucket is the user experience. Who is it serving? What does it do? How might it look? What would be integrated? How hard would it be to build and how long would it take?
The second bucket is a revenue model. It is not true (as some would contend) that if you figure out how to drive value you can find a way to make money. This is SOMETIMES true but not always. If you offer something of value for free people will use it. If you offer something of value that is not free, some people will use it. The question is to try to figure out if enough people (or companies) will pay enough to ultimately sustain your business effort. Pretty basic I suppose but a lot of revenue models are totally unreasonable and they are unreasonable because people want to justify what they are doing or what they hope to do. Pretty nasty trap if you ask me.
Back to the point at hand.
My role is as a synthesizer and I know it. I don’t try to be anything else. You might find something interesting about yourself or your company by weeding through other people’s presentations. And slideshare is a great place to do that. Bookmark it and surf around when you get time.
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Probably too early to say what they are up to but I’d encourage you to go sign up at 
