Netizen

Thursday, April 16, 2009

0 Tweets, 30,000 Followers: Could That Be Oprah?

Yes, it is. Only Oprah can do something ridiculous like that. And I got the Oprah-On-Twitter news from a woman whose middle name is 8 and who is one of the more prolific litterers of my Facebook stream, no complaints. Yes, 8. Yes, the digital age 8. She is so digital. No surprise she dates a Googler. (Craig Silverstein)

Oh Oh Oprah
O O Oprah, Sa Sa Santa
Oprah Needs To Hit The Campaign Trail

I think Twitter has arrived. What do you think? I mean, what is more mainstream than getting Oprah's attention? The Twitter people's gonna celebrate.

I have to admit I have never watched a complete Oprah show. But I think the woman is fascinating and lovely. She has an amazing life story. She is my idea of an out of the box thinker. She has said if she had been given a dollar for every time she was told not to do something but she did it anyways, she would have made a billion. I think she did make a billion.

https://twitter.com/Oprah

My excuse. I don't own a TV. And she is not on YouTube.

Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Guess what I also just noticed. Zemanta now shows you articles from this blog Netizen. Zemanta has arrived.

That StartUp Mentality (2)

Image via CrunchBase

Larry Ellison's first wife left him. During the counseling before the divorce, Ellison said he will make a million dollars if she stayed with him. The wife laughed. They were barely getting by. Ellison worked just enough to pay his share of bills, and not more. One day he went ahead and bought a boat, made a down payment. That sent the wife into therapy. At his peak his net worth was close to 50 billion.
His second wife would put on make up before going to sleep and spend the night face up. Logic? So she did not have to rush in the morning.
His third wife left him for a Harvard MBA. He wrote to a friend. "Congratulations on getting and staying married."
Michael Dell started his computer business in his college dorm. One day his parents called from the airport. We are here to see you. He managed to get all his stuff into his neighbor's bathroom just in time.
Einstein was thought of as a no good student at high school. He barely managed to pass the entrance exams to college. When he was working on the Theory of Relativity, people routinely described him as someone "lazy."
After Steve Wozniak designed the PC, he took the prototype to his bosses at HP. They were utterly uninterested. When Steve Jobs found out Wozniak had done that, he was enraged.
The two YouTube guys had been swiping credit cards not long before they got bought by Google for $1.5 billion.
The two Google guys early on wanted to be bought by Yahoo. Yahoo was uninterested in them. Yahoo could have had the Google search engine for a few tens of millions.
One of the two Google founders Sergei Brin would go on dates in 2000, and he noticed there never were second dates. Women did not return calls. He had a dot com that had never made a dime. That did not look sexy when dot coms were going down left and right. Larry Page jokes that was a big reason they went from doing search only to search and ads. Later it has become search, ads and apps.
Amitabh Bachchan is the most recognized face on the planet, he has ruled the Hindi film industry for about four decades now. I grew up watching him. I used to imitate his hairstyle. I am trying to do it again. In his late 20s, early 30s, he had a decent job in Calcutta. He had a company car, for one, a big deal for the India of the late 1960s. He quit that job and went to Mumbai to give acting a shot. His mother was not happy. He had to struggle for a few years. He had a few flops in a row. Then he got a huge hit, and he never looked back. He is an ultimate family man.
One day Sam Walton showed up in Manhattan at an investment bank. I want to take my company public, who do I talk to, he asked the receptionist. Although Walmart was in debt, the fundamentals of the company were strong. After the receptionist found out he was from Arkansas, she took him to see this lone soul from Arkansas who worked at that bank.
For the longest time after founding Walmart, Walton did not need college graduates. College graduates were over educated and often lacking in basic common sense for the kinds of tasks he had. Then the company grew, and the first string of college graduates started to apply for jobs. The founding team got suspicious.
Bill Gates said he imagined he was going to be a millionaire, even a multi-millionaire, but that he never imagined he was going to be a billionaire.
When Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar, he went on a tour of Europe. He met families of his Oxford friends. They routinely suggested he should come back to their country as ambassador.
When Warren Buffett launched his company, he approached a neighbor, friend. College education is getting expensive these days, he said. If you were to invest 10K in my company, by the time your kids grow up and are ready for college, that investment should take care of their college expenses, he said. The friend refused to invest. That 10K today would have been worth 300 million.
From the book, Soft War, An Intimate Portrait Of Larry Ellison And Oracle by Matthew Symonds, with commentary by Larry Ellison, pages 337-38.

Jimmy says, "I've talked this over with Larry several times, and there's a big difference of perception about this. I was at home with my parents when we got a call from Larry. My father had a long talk with him over the phone, and when he hung up, he said: 'Larry's in trouble. He wants to start a company, and he needs money.' At that time, he'd just become a judge and his salary had dropped dramatically from what he'd been making as a lawyer, but he said, 'I'm not going to say no to the kid.' He went into my sister's savings account and sent him $6,000. The feeling was, he's calling us for help and we'll do all we can for him." Ellison's version is indeed a little different: "I told them that Oracle would go public in about a year or so and that anything they invested in the stock now would increase by a factor of ten. Of course, at the time they honestly believed that they would never see any of their money ever again. In spite of that, they gave me the money. It was an act of kindness. And it turned out to be a pretty good investment too." *

* LE writes: I was wrong about Oracle stock's increasing in value by a factor of ten; it increased by a factor of ten thousand.

CJ Components: Military Handsets

CJ Component Products is based out of the Greater New York area and specializes in tactical communication tools used by the army - ground, air and naval, and the police and the first responders. The company also does contract manufacturing. CJ is a leader in its category. It is open to new design concepts from its major customers.

Their primary presence is in the defense industry. Their handsets are different from similar devices used in other sectors. They tend to be more robust and designed to function in all weather conditions.

Some of their offerings are as follows.

Military handset
Lightweight handset
Tactical handset: Used for small group communication at the frontline of action.
Tactical wireless headsets

(This is an advertisement.)

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

That StartUp Mentality

Image via Wikipedia

It is a mindset. It is a personality type. If a tech entrepreneur were not a tech entrepreneur, he/she would be standing at the edge of a cliff, or facing a hurricane on the high seas. There is something innate about risk-taking. Very few attempt it. Very few of those who attempt succeed. That is why the rewards are so astoundingly huge.

But then that startup mentality is being forced upon the rest of the population. The internet and globalization are going to inject the startup mentality into ordinary jobs. There are degrees of risk taking. Ordinary jobs will have low levels, low doses of risk taking, but it will be there. It is there. It is here.

Looks like the worst part of the bad news of a bad economy might be behind us. You can get gloomy about what just happened. Or you can objectively look at it and see capitalism's creative destructions. What will happen next is way more exciting than what was there before. The jobs, companies and industries of tomorrow stand to be created. This is high time for a mega renewal of the human spirit. I am optimistic. I was throughout the past six months of bad news. All hard economic times of the past decades have also been periods of major innovation, of companies launched that went on to do big, bold things. I don't wish a bad economy upon anyone, but you have to wonder why.

You have to stay hungry also during good times, or success will get the better of you. The trick is to stay hungry during good times. What gets your juices flowing? Do you got fire in your belly?

On The Web

AT&T And Verizon's Start-Up Mentality - Forbes.com
Techcrunch takes on Israeli startup mentality | ISRAELITY
Teaching the Startup Mentality
Startup Mentality
European vs US startup mentality | anders.tyckr.com how often would you say that two of your friends start the same business idea - separately - without them knowing about each other ..... reports keep coming in that the mobile social network market is going to be huge. ..... Europeans do not aim big enough, and on the other hand, US startups go super big with sometimes very crazy ideas. But crazy ideas are only crazy and funny if they are done with bad timing. ...... Going too slow might be a problem, and is probably as hard to fix as going too fast. ..... I would not want to miss a minute of the action to come.

In The News

EBay Unveils Skype IPO Plans BusinessWeek Skype sales surged 44%, to $551 million, last year and the company expects them to top $1 billion in 2011. The user base surged 47%, to 405 million, in 2008. ..... Zennstrom and Friis reportedly offered less than $2 billion for Skype. An IPO could fetch $3 billion to $5 billion ...... Skype could find itself in closer competition with such sites as Facebook or Twitter. ..... "I see [Skype] as a Ferrari that's only firing some of its cylinders."
Plus: Skype in Your Pocket
Google's Trademark Tussle
Business Exchange: Search Advertising
Goldman, Give it All Back
Taxing Grandma to Pay Goldman Sachs
Intel Says PC Demand 'Bottomed'
IBM Roars into Business Consulting
Cuba: How Much, How Fast?
Obama Pitches His Economic Plan
China Faces a Water Crisis
Learning from Recession, the Japanese Way
Nokia: Signs of Stabilization?
Can Widgets Save the Television Industry?
How to Make Acquisitions in a Down Economy
Time to Buy TV, Radio, and Internet Ads?
Put a Human Face on Your Presentations
Today's Tip: Sales Strategy for Tough Economic Times
Getting Ready for the Recovery
Preparing Now to Drive Future Growth
Options for MBAs Without Jobs
Getting to Know Yourself
It's Now a Renter's Market

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