Okay, so I’ve been thinking about this for a while and it’s finally time to test the waters and see if I can pull off this event. At the last Startup Dinner, I mentioned that I’d like to do a startup focused pitch event. The idea would be for startups to get up on stage and do a (strictly enforced!) three minute pitch on their company. I’m calling this event Startup Riot.

Target Audience

The invited audience will be three pronged so that all interested startups will have one or more groups to pitch.

Introducing Startup Riot - Bilgistic.com

It's not that I don't see value to social networks, it's that I generally don't see ENOUGH value. Yes, keeping my address book synchronized with reality is nice, but isn't that likely to be shortly absorbed into the operating system or perhaps into networked applications like Gmail and Yahoo Mail?

This trend has happened over and over as hundreds of portals came and went, leaving a few survivors. Same for hundreds of search engines, hundreds of free e-mail services, etc., etc.

Marshall McLuhan argued that obsolete communication technologies survive as art forms. This is true, I'd say, for Morse code and movable type printing and perhaps even for your venerable Rolodex or typewriter. But it isn't yet true for CB radio, nor for most Internet technologies. Maybe they aren't old enough yet to be appreciated. In the case of CB I think range of reception limits the possible population of players to something less than an artistic critical mass.

What will likely happen to social networking is that some applications will survive on a more modest basis than now (used by the trucker equivalents), others will morph into some new Next Big Thing as their more compelling sub-applications take over, and true hard-core social networkers will jump to more advanced technologies that eliminate the riff-raff. In the meantime, 70 percent or so of most social networking functionality -- the really useful functionality -- will be sucked into the dominant portal/search/e-mail/chat/social networks like MSN and Yahoo.

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Antisocial | PBS

Interestingly, DAT knockout mice have been suggested as an animal model for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Elevated metabolism due to persistent elevated dopamine levels may be a factor contributing to the symptoms of ADHD, Thanos said.

Cocaine's Effects on Brain Metabolism May Contribute to Abuse

Net::Wake - A package to send packets to power on computers.

perl -MNet::Wake -e "Net::Wake::by_udp(undef,'00:00:87:A0:8A:D2')"

Net::Wake - A package to send packets to power on computers. - search.cpan.org

Magic Seaweed has great surf reports.

Flagler Pier Surf Report, Surf Forecast and Surf Webcams

Welcome to JNode.org, the website of the Java New Operating System Design Effort.

JNode is a simple to use & install Java operating system for personal use.
It runs on modern devices.

Any java application will run on it, fast & secure!
JNode is open source and uses the LGPL license.

JNode.org | :: ~ JNode.free(yourMind); ~ ::

A majority of the money, $45 million, was raised online, the campaign said. More than 90 percent of the donations were under $100, and more than half were under $25.

Obama raises $55 million in February, sets new record - CNN.com

Documents submitted by Federal Aviation Administration inspectors to congressional investigators allege the airline flew at least 117 of its planes in violation of mandatory safety checks.

In some cases, the documents say, the planes flew for 30 months after government inspection deadlines had passed and should have been grounded until the inspections could be completed.

The planes were "not airworthy," according to congressional air safety investigators.

Doh!

Records: Southwest Airlines flew 'unsafe' planes - CNN.com

Like their counterparts in Japan in the 1990s, American authorities may be deluding themselves into believing they can forestall the endgame of post-bubble adjustments. Government aid is being aimed, mistakenly, at maintaining unsustainably high rates of personal consumption. Yet that's precisely what got the United States into this mess in the first place - pushing down the savings rate, fostering a huge trade deficit and stretching consumers to take on an untenable amount of debt.

A more effective strategy would be to try to tilt the economy away from consumption and toward exports and long-needed investments in infrastructure.

The unwinding of excesses - International Herald Tribune

olves a customer need in a way that makes them want to tell their friends about it. And if you have a whole product, a product that has everything that is needed for the customer to buy, you are going to be touching every "function" in the organization. I don't see anyway around this. Taking this course of thought to its logical conclusion you arrive at the realization that every employee is involved in marketing. And in this day and age they are.

Secondly, promotion, which most people think about when they say marketing, is not some isolated activity that can be bolted on at the end. It interacts with all the other elements of the marketing mix and if you try to address it as an afterthought after the product has been created you are doomed to failure. Doomed.

To do successful startup marketing every employee needs to make decisions from the beginning with the potential customer in mind. And not in the back of the mind. In the front.

Marketing is not a department.

Lance Weatherby is doing a 10 part series on startup marketing.

Force_of_Good: Marketing Is Not A Department