Guy Kawasaki, Apple Computer legend, founder and managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm:

Here's what not to do:

Create a venture capital fund, because capital isn't the issue; good ideas are (which is why we need engineering schools and foreigners).

The stuff you don't have always seems harder to come by than the stuff you have. Kawasaki must know that he doesn't fund ideas, he funds teams of people, and the cheaper those people are, the better, which is why he needs "engineering schools and foreigners."

USNews.com: Opinion: Capital Commerce: : What if America Had an Innovation Czar?

Compact-disc sales dropped 20% from a year earlier over the first three months of this year.

• CDs account
for more than 85% of music sold.

• Major retailers have closed about 800 music stores.

• 2007 has seen the
two lowest-selling No. 1 albums since data began being kept (by Nielsen SoundScan) in 1991.

The Big Picture | CD Sales Plunge 20% so far in '07

This is an oldie but a goodie. I happened onto it today and figured I'd re-recommend it.

Separate the facts from the fads: A groundbreaking, five-year study reveals the must-have management practices that truly produce superior results.

Excel at Four Primary Practices:

Strategy: Devise and maintain a clearly stated, focused strategy.
Execution: Develop and maintain flawless operational execution.
Culture: Develop and maintain a performance-oriented culture.
Structure: Build and maintain a fast, flexible, flat organization.

Embrace Two of Four Secondary Practices:

Hold on to talented employees and find more.
Make industry-transforming innovations.
Find leaders who are committed to the business and its people.
Seek growth through mergers and partnerships.

What Really Works

Welcome to Startupping

Startupping is a one-of-a-kind community resource created for Internet entrepreneurs by Internet entrepreneurs. It is a place to share information, ask questions, and tap into the experience of others who have built and are building web businesses. Read blog posts about startup issues, participate in our discussion forums, and view our wiki resources, including sample term sheets and a glossary. For more information about the Startupping site, see our about page.

Most cool!

Startupping - A Community for Entrepreneurs

The bottom line of all this for anyone running a social network already, or if you are in the process of building a new one… make sure that everything you do is designed to maximize monetization, as the difference between success and failure will rest on this metric.

Hell yeah! Everything we do at Industrial Memetics is designed to maximize monetization! See that little donation box in the corner. Monetization Baby! Soon, we'll roll out ads. Eventually, key MemeStreams posters will charge a subscription to read their premium posts, and we'll regularly blog about companies that have paid us to blog about them. Why do you think those SEO people keep showing up here? We're the Monitization Kings!

Since the core revolves around people (not products), it is vital that any innovation in brand communication include the active and explicit participation of those people within the process itself.

MemeStreams: Participating in our own manipulation since 2001!

For Social Networks, 2007 is about MONEY

n 1953 the celebrated Harvard behavioural psychologist BF Skinner published a paper about the gambling habits of rats. Testing his theory of 'operant conditioning' he had noticed a strange compulsive tendency among his laboratory rodents.

When one of Skinner's rats pressed a lever, it was given a food pellet. By experiment Skinner then established that if a pellet was delivered only on the 10th press of the lever, the rat would quickly learn to press the lever 10 times. If, however, a random element was introduced to the lever-pressing, whereby a pellet was still introduced on average one in 10 times, but sometimes delivered twice or three times in a row and sometimes not for 20 or more presses, the rat apparently became obsessed with the lever-operation itself.

This is how I feel about the Nintendo Wii. Here is another take on the Wii... Not safe for work... :)

The best chance you'll get? | Review | The Observer

It began as a covert guerrilla action that spread virally and eventually became a revolution.

What is it?

At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical -- if risky -- experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.

They are going to do this not only at corporate, but also at the retail outlets.

Sweet!

Smashing The Clock

A brilliant idea is neither necessary nor sufficient for a successful business, although all else being equal it can't hurt. Microsoft is probably the canonical example of a successful business, and it has never had a single brilliant idea in its entire history.

Rondam Ramblings: Top ten geek business myths

VeriSign, Inc. will acquire its leading competitor in the market for SSL certificates, GeoTrust Inc., for $125 million in cash, the two companies said today.

I have been doing business with GeoTrust for years specifically because I don't want to give money to the company responsible for SiteFinder (I own .com domains, but its a monopoly so I don't really have a choice). Is there another SSL certificate company that I can purchase from that isn't owned by Verisign? Anyone ever use Comodo?

Netcraft: VeriSign To Buy GeoTrust, Combining Top SSL Providers

Why do supposedly serious people embrace such ideas?

These folks (and this organization appears to be Hillary's baby) clearly have an agenda of their own, but the criticism of Florida is not without some merit, even if they have oversimplified his thesis.

Blarg. This article is pure political garbage from start to finish. The reason that he can't understand why supposedly serious people would embrace "such ideas" is because they don't. He is buring a straw man. The path to building one of Florida's cool havens isn't by attracting tolerant people as a starting point. You do it by building intellectual property and employment laws that prevent incumbent companies from squashing startups, cultivating local universities and allowing work done there to flow into the economy, promoting local angel and venture capital investor groups, making it easy for people to form businesses, and creating a community thats attractive in terms of providing a safe, secure urban environment with decent public services. However, if you do all of this and you still have the local police performing raids on gay bars you can assume that the kind of people you are interested in attracting to your city aren't going to want to live there.

People aren't flowing out of places like San Francisco because they don't like San Franciso and they think Des Moines is where the economic future lies. They are moving because they don't have a choice because the tech economy contracted. Taking the fact that the "dot com" economy contracted as a general indictment of an innovation driven economy, as it appears Congress did with their idiotic options expensing change, is the fast path to irrelevancy, a.k.a throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

The purpose of this article is to reach out to conservative, red state voters by showing that good "centrist" democrats don't like gay people either, and think young, urban, tolerant people are silly and irrelevant. Des Moines is where its at, baby. The swipe at teachers unions is particularly entertaining. Are we supposed to beleive that these people are now also economic conservatives?

This is why I don't support Hillary Clinton or Joe Liberman. They pander to the fucking authoritarian people in this country. Moderate Republicans are greatly preferable in that they don't have to seek out some scape goat to punish in order to demonstrate their social conservativeness.

Too Much Froth