[viddler id=ac017301&w=437&h=370]
Note: some websites I mentioned:
E-180
TechStars
DreamIt
Capital Factory
{ 1 comment }
If you’re a tech entrepreneur ( or want to be one), you know how important it is to stay cutting-edge. This list is meant for you.
If you’re working for a tech startup, you know how important marketing is. Duct tape offers effective internet marketing strategies that easy to implement along with a library of resources such as articles from topics like outsourcing to personal branding.
Chris Anderson’s blog the editor of by far the most mainstream geeky magazine Wired. Here, Chris blogs about the concept of the Long Tail which as he puts it:
“The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.”
The blog gives practical examples of tech entrepreneurs exploiting this idea as well as other tech entreprenurship news and business models.
3. Six Pixels of Seperation by Mitch Joel
Mitch Joel is the guru of digital marketing in Canada. By the way he writes and the quality of his posts ( and podcasts), you can see he is passionate about what he does. He provides his views about digital marketing and delivers it in way thats enjoyable to read.
2. Seth Godin
As tech entrepeneurs, we want to change the world. Seth Godin’s blog posts will be that daily reminder that we are ought to change the world and that justifies our dedication and determination. Seth Godin is a 10 time business best selling author.
1. Mashable
Stay on the top of every interesting web or social media startup that pops up with Mashable. You’ll wonder how you were doing without it. They provide you with resources for entreprenurs and reviews of the newest startups that will keep you up to date with the freshest ideas. Be the first to know whats happening on the web!
{ 6 comments }
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
- Mark Twain
It’s amazing how many people I see that are afraid to set sail, afraid to learn about themselves and find and pursue their passions. I don’t blame them. It is easy and comfortable to be at the ’safe harbor’. It is failure, and the risks of being different that makes people reluctant to explore. The seas can be calm, or they can be tumultuous torrents and you don’t know until you sail. To explore, is not easy. It requires you to walk in unknown territory, but it’s worth it.
The most interesting people, the people you read about in Business weekly or the people who give talks at TED, are people who have made more mistakes in their lives than most regular people. As a young adult, I am trying to make as many mistakes as I can, actively learning about as much as I can and satisfying my intellectual curiosity even though I may not be good at everything I learn about. Even dropping a coffee on your lap is a mistake that will teach you to hold your coffee with a firmer grip and in turn, make you a more successful person in a way. A great way to learn is through experiences so I want to make my mistakes now, so when I will be older, I will have built up the experience I need to really succeed. I am finally getting to a point where my experiences. I am starting to feel that the mistakes and the knowledge I have accumulated is really started to define me as person.
These learning experiences that are a result of exploring are closely tied into the concept of luck. I don’t like using clichés, I find they lose their meanings but one I really like; you make your own luck. But the cliché fails to qualify the meaning of how you make it, its through experiences. Luck is a function of the amount you learn and experience, not a complete random phenomenon.
So learn, explore and reach your potential. The riskiest thing to be is to be conservative.
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
- Niels Bohr
{ 0 comments }
Sometimes I sit in a lecture at McGill, as I scramble to take notes and retain the information and I ask myself, would I just be better quitting school and doing my own thing?
I am not your normal student. I like to be hands-on and effecting change. I don’t like to sit passively as I listen to a professor, and study for tests that may/may not represent my knowledge about a particular subject and that’s exactly the concept school. If I was studying international development, learning about the imbalances of the world economy and its vast injustices, I would feel the urge to jump the next plane to India, and start a project to provide electricity to a village and really create change. Sitting in a classroom learning about South-Western Albertan history from 1776-1777, would not be the best use of my time when for example, if I had hopes to catalyze development in rural India. I know what your thinking, university gives you the basis of knowledge, shapes your brain in a certain way and when your earning a degree, your earning a ‘degree’ of credibility. This is very true but, at the end of the day, with all the vast educational resources available on the internet, I can assure you that if I spent 8 hours a day on TED or reading/listening to my favorite bloggers/podcasters, I would be a more well-rounded person and more knowledgeable in areas that interests me the most, which is the convergence of technological entrepreneurship, marketing and social media. Even if there existed a program suited exactly to my needs, it would not be as effective as learning it from the best people in the world which the internet empowers me to do. With the structure and bureaucracy that exists at universities such as McGill, it is almost impossible to pick courses your truly interested in. This forces me to spend my nights to get my ‘real’ education, very informally. My informal education is the education that is makes me a remarkable person, not McGill. My McGill education gets me the job interview, but its my unique ideas what in the interview from my informal education that seals the deal, and separates me from the pack. It also makes networking easier, because people are more apt to hear what you have to say, if what you have to say is worth hearing.
When I think about all that I have learned, and what has made me who I am over the past few years, I realize that it was my informal education that has shaped who I am today. Realize the importance of educating yourself in areas that truly interest you. Sometimes the structure of our society makes us pursue something that we don’t want to as a means to an end, be it if you’re a 50 year old working at McDonalds but watch videos of Seth Godin at night with dreams of starting to save up enough cash to start that company that you’ve always wanted or a 21 year old student studying Management reading up on the business of sports with hopes of one day owning the New York Yankees. With the internet, it is a shame not to take advantage of the resources for informal education available. Not only will it make you a smarter and more confident person, but it will make you more marketable and attractive in this increasingly competitive job market.
After thinking about it, its clear that it’s the balance between formal and informal education that consists of a full education. You cannot have a ‘true’ education without one or the other. You can only develop to your potential with them both. A 4.0 GPA is worth 2.0 if you have no balance.
How do we define higher education in the 21st century? Has it changed? Why? Are degrees more important or less important than they were 20 years ago?
{ 4 comments }
I used to love waking up, brewing up a cup of coffee, make some toast and sit down and enjoy the newspaper. I loved reading about what was happening around the world, whats new in business and see what up with Charlie Brown and his dog Snoopy. There was a special something about being able to read the newspaper, and feel as if I was connected to the outside world.
I no longer get that same excitement when I read the morning paper. When I look at the newspaper these days, I see yesterday’s news. Now, I am always connected to the world, be it via RSS, tweets ( that’s right, I’m using twitter jargon now) or my favorite news website. I suppose that I shouldn’t be so surprised that newspapers are progressively regressing. Its a new connected world today. On September 28, 2004, a search on “podcast” in Google turned up 24 matches. Today, a search for podcast returns 132,000,000 matches. Obviously, we are getting our media differently. When I read the newspaper today, I feel unfulfilled, I find myself used to see comments/opinions by other users, how many times the article has been ‘dugg’ and a video. Do I care about what stocks closed at yesterday? When I can get my stock tickers in real-time on an iPhone, that makes the stocks section in a newspaper obsolete. It is much more effective to use Standout Jobs to find potential employees rather than going to your local newspaper and placing an ad. In today’s world, its a liability to read the newspaper.
I like reading about technology entrepreneurship news. When new startups come online, I like being the first to hear about their idea and see what people are saying about it. I cannot get that information from a newspaper. Luckily, I’m subscribed to some blogs to get the info I need. Newspaper is an interesting word, which means a paper with news. But ‘news’ has to be new, and with websites that are constantly updating their content, the news of newspaper, is no longer ‘news’. This has resulted in a paradigm shift. Paradigm shift is a concept which means that the community has transformed the way of thinking from one way to another driven by agents of change.
Who would have predicted that media would have evolved to what it is today in such a short period of time. Whats in store for media in the future?
{ 2 comments }
- Exercise 3 times a week
- Find a mentor who is an agent of change.
- Stop going to the same restaurants week after week, and try new ones.
- Start drinking more tea and less coffee
- Make an iPhone application
- Go to a wine tasting
- Create a website that is fully operational
- Read at least 2 books a month
- Use social media to help a non-profit
- Be altruistic
- Make a name for myself in the Montreal technological entrepreneur community.
- Prove that a full-time 20 year old student can launch a successful startup in an economic recession.
- Start making video blog posts
{ 6 comments }
So I finally decided to try out Twitter. Everyday Twitter is gaining ground and proving itself to be an asset for brand management, marketing and plain-old fun. I decided to start Twittering for 3 main reasons.
1. It can help me market myself better. Everyone has a Me Inc. to portray, and if I can expose myself and gain more ‘market share’ (eg: more traffic to my blog) then i am just bettering myself and exposing myself to more potential opportunities. It also can help me to network with like-minded individuals.
2. It would be cool to follow my role models ( most of whom Twitter because their nerds ) on Twitter.
3. I’m interested to see how businesses use Twitter for marketing purposes.
I do believe that if I can build a following on I started playing around with it already, and the addictive aspect to it. Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (aka tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. You’d be surprised how many interesting people are Twittering, and how keeping to 140 characters limit helps users creates unique and interesting content. Twitter embodies a lot of tendencies that our society has recently formed. We have become a people who have lost patience, and have only time for 140 characters at best. What does this means forblogs? Better yet, what does this mean for books ( or even academic courses?).
I’ll continue to play around with Twitter and relay my experiences. Check it out: http://twitter.com/gregisenberg
{ 0 comments }
For my two week break from school, I decided to keep busy. I have been reading heavily to try to become more of an expert and to get inspired. When I think of great leaders and what they were doing at 20 years old, it makes me feel like I’m behind because I have not achieved so much, so it makes me strive to learn more.
My favirote read was the newest book by Seth Godin called Tribes. Seth Godin for those who don’t know is a bestselling marketing author and well-known blogger. The book although a short read, prophesizes about the idea of a tribe which is a group of people small or large, who are connected to one another, a leader or an idea. Godin claims that the internet laid the foundation for a system that makes the creation of tribes easier, and the growing of tribes much faster. Godin says anyone can be a leader and this empowers the average individual greatly. This was the exact book I needed to give me the mental reinforcement I needed to believe I can be a leader. The more I look around, the more leaders I see that are everyday people with passion. The tribe that comes to mind that is close to home is Boo Ya Pictures, a group of Montrealers who strive to make funny short-films and who use the internet and social networking to market their material. Two important point needs to be made before I can continue.
1. Up until 10 years ago, if you wanted to show a video to the public, you couldn’t. Perhaps there existed one television program that accepted amateur videos and small number would be picked to be on the show. Now with the power shifted to the individual rather than the media, the guys at Boo Ya could upload their videos with complete disregard to geography, cost and time ( am I the only one that thinks this is pretty cool? ).
2. Boo Ya Pictures found a niche, and are becoming leaders and are successfully marketing to their niche through their YouTube channel ( many videos of over 10 000 hits each), social networking websites like facebook and social content websites like digg . They have created a tribe.
Small tribes like Boo Ya or large tribes Barack Obama fans are able to talk to each other about their common interest through the internet’s new wave of websites ( coined ’web 2.0′ ) and this only helps fuel growth. Marketing has changed. Using the marketing taught in business schools is dangerous as it does not teach the new ways of marketing. The whole concept of the super bowl is that you are able to catch the attention of 130 million eyeballs for a brief moment and you have their attention. This phenomena is called interrupting marketing because you are interrupting the viewer and you have the chance to market your product. However, this kind of marketing is becoming increasingly irrelevant, as ads are placed everywhere from in front of urinals to on the subway ( the average American sees 3000 ads per day) . People are swarmed by ads and this makes it more difficult for the marketer to capture the attention of the people. The new marketing has to do with social interactions and tribes. Boo ya pictures was able to market their videos for free, with its tribe members able to make the videos popular. Look at the discussions in their videos, and you can see that the tribe members are passionate about Boo Ya. The tribe members are doing the marketing for Boo Ya and its highly effective. The infrastructure of these social media websites are made for tribes and help tribe members easily interact with one another (think facebook groups or Ning). Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling for an end to interrupting marketing, not at all, it is still a powerful marketing tool, but I am saying that there is exists another and very powerful marketing that is free and is effecting change. The super bowl does capture the attention of a mass amount of people and this does help market your product some people, but social interactions and viral marketing through the internet has a much higher rate of conversion. Through this new form of marketing, ordinary people are able to market their ideas as well as express themselves in ways people have not been able to do before. The recent surge in small businesses is because of these tribes being able to find a minority target market, and build a tribe ( think apple fans are people fed up with Microsoft Windows )
What I’m trying to get at is the marketplace is different, and when you cant adjust to the new ways of marketing, you will struggle in this new economy based on ideas. This is one of the reasons I don’t feel bad for the big 3 American auto corporations. If they talked to their tribe about the products they wanted, and used some new marketing techniques, perhaps they would not be in the trouble they are in today. This new marketing does not have to do with just business but non profits ( ie: effectiveness of direct mail for funrdraising is diminishing ), and even filmakers like Boo Ya.
I’m really excited about the future of marketing. How about you?
{ 0 comments }
When a great opportunity arises, there is always a risk attached. Great thinkers and leaders, have the ability to seize these opportunities almost immediately. I wish I had started a search engine company in 1995 ( mind you I was only 6 years old), but the people who saw it as a potential powerful tool for changing the way internet users find information while changing the fundamentals of marketing, were one step ahead of the pack. Being one step ahead, literally means being one step ahead. But to get ahead, you need to be constantly looking which step you should be taking. People don’t just end up one step ahead. You can say it was luck that Perez Hilton started a blog that makes more money in ads per week, than the President of America makes in a year but it was his ability ( and I don’t like complementing Perez, so you know how much this is killing me) to see the opportunity in the realm of blogs about celebrity gossip, and deliver the content in a new remarkable way which created an army of dedicated and loyal fans.
Being able to see the ‘gap’, and being able to execute it properly are two different things. There are many great ideas that when attempting to make that leap from being on paper to reality, fails miserably ( think McDonalds pizza. Just kidding). That does not mean that it is unfeasible, merely, the manner in which you tried to execute is unfeasible. You must look for other ways to get your idea out there. Think to yourself; I have an idea, which way will this idea work best, if it doesn’t work, why didn’t it work . If its because of your idea, be smart enough throw your idea out ( even though you feel attached to it) and if it isn’t then ask how could I have implemented it in a way that it would have worked. The reason why the iPhone is such a success is not because the idea of a touch-screen phone is so revolutionary, rather, the idea was coupled with a great execution from the marketing strategy to the software and even the position of the logo was done in a perfect fashion.
What I am trying to get at is, there are three things you should be doing if you want to affect change.
1. Keep your eyes open and your head up. Never stop learning, sharing ideas with friends and satisfying your curiosity. The world does not wait for you. Every minute lost, is a minute someone else has the opportunity to do what you have not done. The new global economy means that you need to be faster and better because the market is more competitive.
2. Be determined. If you have an idea, or come across an opportunity that is important to you, do it.
3. Do it right. If you don’t know how to do it right, learn.
4. Rise and repeat.
Seizing an idea, is much different than seeing an idea. I have a book of ideas and opportunities that can arise from this book, but its how I seize them, that is the hard part.
{ 2 comments }
Until Dec. 15, I will be studying hard, and I will not be able to post blog posts until then. Its not because I dont have the desire to wrtie posts anymore, its actually the opposite, everyday I think about more and more interesting ideas for blog posts, but rather, I need to get good grades.
So until we meet again.
{ 1 comment }