Madeleine started using her new gadget – the Sony Reader Digital Book.  While on plane, at beach, and in the airport, it was amazing how many people asked her about it.   For anyone that know Madeleine, they understand she reads a lot — and generally totes 5 or 6 books on a vacation.  This may be the best gift I ever got her.

You need to sell internally.  It is amazing how many CEOs and Top Execs are so good at selling to clients (externally), but do not sell their ideas, vision, projects to the executive management team.  If I could bestow one priority, one must do, one thing that will make these ececutives better – it is that they sell as hard internally to their partners and other execs as they do to clients.

Day 1 – Climbing School, 8.20.07 So my boots were too big – I did not check and picked up a size 11.  ARGGG.  I also did need sunglasses (should have brought the ones I took to BM that click in the front).  We did not need mittens – and I should have taken the gloves we had since the rentals were not great. I also needed to rent a pair of shell pants since taking off shoes to put on shell is not a good idea (and I brought those ski pants). Overall, save for the bad fit on the shoes, we had a great time.  The team was 9 students and 2 guides (one more guide will be added tomorrow.)  It was a cold and rainy day, but we did just fine.  Hiked up to the snow and practiced walking, rescue (team and self), using the ice axe, and ropes.  We came down a bit wet, but everyone in one piece.  Currently back from dinner and drying out cloths so I can pack for tomorrow.  Pics uploaded on BLOG.  We all miss CB, sorry he broke his leg.  Regardless if we summit or not, this is a fun adventure.

Saw the Bucket List with Madeleine on New Years Eve.  As many of my friends know, I have a "Life List" of things to do before I die.  The movie is directed by Rob Reiner and stars Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.   It is a terrific movie.  Fortunately, I have to live a really long time, b/c though I do knock many things off the list, I add a lot more than I cross off!  Though it appears the film is receiving mediocre reviews, I enjoyed it tremendously.

Last night I sent the following to Virgin America: You indicated "Your comments are really important to us and we’ll write back as soon as we can, within the next 21days". It has been 44 days!  Please call or email. This is not acceptable customer service. Virgin America responded: This message has been sent automatically to let you know that we have your e-mail, so please don’t reply to this address. Your comments are really important to us and we’ll write back as soon as we can, within the next 21days. They do not get it!  You can move to the Internet and encourage your customers to use the Internet to transact, but somewhere along the line, you need people.   Customer Service Rating:  F

More breathtaking Life Cube photos taken by Justin Tyler Gines. Stay tuned for more sneak peeks of the upcoming photo book. #art #thelifecubeproject #downtownlasvegas #photographer #justintylergines #Burningman #downtownlasvegas #photography #LasVegas #dtlv #lifecubeproject #LV #lifecube #BurningMan

Working with a number of start-ups, and launching a new company, I think this article by Miguel Helft in the New York Times offers some interesting observations on how competitive the landscape is to hire talent, but more important, what a new company can offer that may be a lot more appealing to the best of the best! In Fierce Competition, Google Finds Novel Ways to Feed Hiring Machine By MIGUEL HELFT Published: May 28, 2007 (Picture: Alice Yu-shan Chang will work for Google after she receives master’s degrees in computer science and management science from Stanford.) MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — On a spring Saturday, about 90 students from Stanford and as many from the UniversityCalifornia, Berkeley, converged on Google’s corporate campus for a day of spirited team competition over mind-bending puzzles, Lego building problems and video games. Nitay Joffe, a computer engineer, chose the start-up company Powerset over Google. It was called the Google Games, a convivial way for the mostly computer science and engineering students to renew the Stanford-Berkeley rivalry. But behind the fun was a serious corporate recruiting event that underscores a rivalry no less intense: the tug of war for talent between Google and its competitors. As much of the high-tech industry is enjoying a renewed boom, the competition for top recruits in engineering and other fields is as intense as ever. Companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo frequently find themselves going after the same candidates or recruiting in one another’s backyards. At the same time, they are running up against a myriad of start-up companies across Silicon Valley that have been pumped up with venture capital in recent years. To lure talent, these companies have expanded their recruiting arsenal far beyond the traditional job fair to include a growing number of events like technology lectures, cocktail parties, pizza parties, treasure hunts and programming contests, dubbed “code jams” or “hack days.” Much like the Google Games, these are no-pressure recruiting occasions meant to create excitement around their companies and impress potential recruits as young as college freshmen. “It comes down to just getting them introduced to our culture, showing them that, hey, being part of Google could be a lot of fun,” said Ken Krieger, a Google engineer who had volunteered to supervise the Lego-building contest. Google, more than any other company, looms large in this latest chapter of Silicon Valley’s talent wars. The company has been vacuuming talent wherever it can find it to keep fueling its torrid growth. Its work force has roughly doubled every year for the last several years, to more than 12,200 at the end of March. Google is now adding about 500 workers each month. Its Web site lists nearly 800 open positions in the San Francisco Bay Area alone. If Google is hungry for top talent, the class of 2007 seems to think that a Google job offer is a prized commodity. Stories about Google’s notoriously tough and sometimes off-putting recruiting process continue to surface. Even so, the company was considered the most desirable employer for all undergraduates this year, and for the first time, it edged out the blue-chip consulting firm McKinsey & Company as the most desirable employer among M.B.A.’s, a position McKinsey had held for the last 12 years, according to surveys conducted by Universum, a research firm. “Being in an environment where you are going to learn a lot is the most important thing to me,” said Alice Yu-shan Chang, one of hundreds of recruits who are graduating this year and heading for Google. Ms. Chang, who is finishing master’s degrees in computer science and management science at Stanford, was sought by both Microsoft and Google, as well as eBay and Oracle. She said Microsoft had done what it could to find the right group for her, first at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash., and then, upon learning that she did not want to leave the Bay Area, at its Mountain View campus, not far from Google’s. She received phone calls from company vice presidents and met face-to-face with one of them. “With Google, you don’t have that much face time with high-up people,” she said. But there was some wining and dining on the part of Google, which Ms. Chang would not discuss in detail because she had signed a nondisclosure agreement. Eventually, Google won, in part because it had agreed to permit Ms. Chang to rotate positions every six months in the first year and half, and because, for her, it was a better cultural fit. “There are a lot of young people there who are very creative,” Ms. Chang, 25, said. Many of her peers at Microsoft would have been in their 30s and 40s “and more family oriented,” she said. In the last two years, Google has expanded its university recruiting programs to nearly 200 campuses from about 70. But the ubiquity of its events has ruffled some feathers. Max Levchin, the chief executive of Slide, a technology start-up in San Francisco, said he used to have good luck recruiting from his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, by going there in midyear and persuading computer-science students to defer graduation and join him in Silicon Valley. “Now all I hear about is Google holding a puzzle hunt this, or Google campus pizza that,” Mr. Levchin said in an e-mail interview. Chief executives at other start-ups had similar frustrations. Stanford does not keep an official tally of where its students go, and even informal numbers are not in for the class of 2007. But an unscientific, voluntary check of students run by the university’s career center showed that Stanford had funneled more of its graduates to Google than to any other employer in the last three years. While playing down the rivalry with Microsoft, which is hiring at an even faster rate than Google, albeit into a company nearly six times as large, Google has not shied away from bringing the competition for talent to Microsoft’s door. Google has more openings in the Seattle area than anywhere else in the country other than California and New York. “I think it’s unlikely that you’ll see us back up a truck to their parking lot,” Google’s director for staffing programs, Judy Gilbert, said. “We have done a lot of things to engage with the local talent in an appropriate way.” As an example, Ms. Gilbert, a former recruiter for McKinsey, pointed to a lecture this year at Google by Kaifu Lee, the president of Google Greater China, which was intended to appeal to the “large community of Chinese ex-pats” in the Seattle area. Mr. Lee used to head Microsoft’s research organization in China. After Google hired him in 2005, Microsoft sued Google and Mr. Lee, accusing him of violating a noncompete agreement and misusing inside information. The lawsuit was later settled. Google’s efforts notwithstanding, Microsoft and Yahoo say they are able to hire the candidates they need. “Our competition is really the market for top talent, not a specific company,” said Scott Pitarsky, Microsoft’s general manager for talent acquisition. Similarly, Yahoo, which held a hack day at its campus that was attended by about 500 programmers, as well as smaller ones elsewhere, said its recruiting strategies were working. The company also opened a research center at Berkeley in part to attract student interns. “Dozens of people have come from the labs into Yahoo,” said Bradley Horowitz, vice president for product strategy at Yahoo. All three companies say their toughest recruiting challenges come from start-ups, who snap up people like Nitay Joffe. Mr. Joffe, who had summer internships at Google for the last two years, expected to go to work there. But before Mr. Joffe, a recent computer engineering graduate of the University of California, San Diego, accepted a job, a friend suggested he check out a San Francisco start-up, Powerset, which is trying to build a rival search engine. “Powerset had everything that Google had in terms of what I was looking for — smart people, interesting projects, great amenities,” Mr. Joffe said. Powerset also had one thing Google could not offer: the potential to strike it rich with the Internet equivalent of a lottery ticket. “When you get a stock option at 5 cents and it goes to $50 …,” Mr. Joffe said, before his voice trailed off. With Google’s shares hovering around $480, it no longer offers the same potential. “Google isn’t going to $4,000,” said Mr. Joffe, who began working at Powerset recently. For every recruit who gets away, Google hopes many more enter its pipeline of potential employees at events like the Google Games. “We never say, ‘Come work for us,’ ” said Ronner Lee, who is in charge of Google’s university programs at Berkeley. “If they like what they see here and they want to approach us with questions, that’s great.” If the goal was to impress this crowd, it did not hurt that the games were held inside one of Google’s cafeterias, where the food is free, healthful and plentiful. Or that students were picked up at their campuses by Google’s free shuttles, which are outfitted with wireless Internet access. Or that many of the puzzles were created by the No. 2 Sudoku player in the world, who, by the way, happens to work at Google. David Nguyen, a doctoral student at Berkeley who went to Google for the games, said the company clearly understands its target audience. “This is exactly the kind of person they want,” Mr. Nguyen said, “someone who is going to work and solve problems on a Saturday and enjoy it.”

The airlines are a mess.  I was supposed to fly out to SD yesterday for a meeting, and again, a flight gets canceled with no notice or call. My profile has all the info. I signed up for notifications. This is really bad. You pay for car services and still end up with missing the boat (or plane as it was). In addition, virgin sent the following email, only to NOT Follow-up as they promised!  It was a good move by whoever runs customer service to manage expectations when you file a complaint or have a bad experience, but come on guys. Respond. I would award the "poor business award of the quarter’ to Virgin America, but…. their email to me: —–Original Message—– From: Customer.Relations.US@fly.virgin.com [mailto:Customer.Relations.US@fly.virgin.com] Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 1:01 AM To: Scott Cohen Subject: Re: from my BLOG – BAD CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE! Thanks for writing to us. This message has been sent automatically to let you know that we have your e-mail, so please don’t reply to this address. Your comments are really important to us and we’ll write back as soon as we can, within the next 21days. Please feel free to take a look at our website as it tells you everything you need to know about the customer relations and baggage claims service.  The address is http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/us/customerrelations/index.jsp. Kind regards Virgin Atlantic Customer Relations

July 6 2007 Video Ads: Every Startup Has A Different Solution Nick Gonzalez It may seem weird, but I’ve been eagerly awaiting the day when I see ads in my viral video. eMarketer expects There are a couple key issues they’re all struggling with as they try and generate the greatest amount of ad revenue. There’s still some uncertainty about where to put the ads (pre/post/interstitial?). Even the type or length of the ad is up for debate. A recent study After deciding on the format, determining the content of the video in order to generate relevant ads is yet another tough problem. It’s also a dire matter for big brands that don’t want to risk being associated with inflammatory content. Finally, these ad platforms will need publishers, advertisers and a marketplace to trade in. Here’s a look at what people are doing in video advertising: launch adHoc Coming up with a kick ass, scalable ad platform solution for social video that satisfies the needs of publishers, advertisers, and viewers is only a piece of the problem. While finding the most effective format will take a lot of testing until consumers reveal the most effective methods, the platforms will also need video content to monetize. Since well defined video properties with targeted content can work with sponsors on established video ad networks, the ideal market for these platforms remains effectively monetizing the jumble of amateur viral video floating around on social networks and YouTube. However, YouTube, which currently owns the lion’s share of video on the net, seems to be taking their time developing the solution in house. That leaves becoming a destination, partnerships, or acquisition as possible outs. Video search sites like Blinkx and Everyzing are currently monetizing their search pages, but can’t take full advantage of their platforms by embedding ads into the content they link to. While these sites offer deeper video search, existing as a destination site is also a tough path that goes up against established web properties like Google, Yahoo, and AOL. In a slightly different way of going it alone, AdBrite has been going directly to publishers with their InVideo player. Adap.tv has been testing out partnerships, trying their platform out on MetaCafe As with most ad platforms, advertisers and publishers will be trying them out for effectiveness. In the end, the startups that can deliver the most return to these two will win out.

TheParagraph size "Stupid Business Decision of the Week" goes to SONY!  I just purchased a new super-duper laptop, the SONY SZ480 which came with a "ATT/CINGULAR 2 MONTH TRIAL". While traveling, the wireless did not work.  After spending about 2 hours on the phone with tech support, the wireless works, but was running slow and then dropping.  I called back (another hour), to download drivers, and all sorts of fixes.  It was working again, but still really slow.  I asked the tech support guy, Dave, who finally admitted that the Cingular Network was just a little faster than dial-up. So, here’s the deal.  You buy a terrific computer with a built in wireless card that hooks up to the slowest network out there!  What were they thinking.  Cingular should be ashamed to be offering such a bad product, and SONY made a terrible decision to offer this instead of Verizon or SPRINT.  So for an extra few bucks you might get from Cingular, you cost yourself 4 hours of tech support, a dissatisfied customer, and earned the "Stupid Business Decision of the Week Award"! QUESTION:  What city was I in?  ANSWER:  LA, NY, Seattle, and Chicago. Question:  Did you tell SONY you were going to BLOG this?  Answer:  YES!  I begged them to have a supervisor call.  I was recorded on the customer service call.  I strongly suggested they have someone call and explain why they selected to include Cingular in this otherwise fine piece of equipment. Wireless broadband access anywhere, anytime for your laptop using a PCMCIA card. TAGS:  SONY, CINGULAR, AT&T, ATT, VERIZON, SPRINT, Broadband Internet, wireless broadband, Cingular Wireless, Sprint Communications, PCMCIA card, Verizon Communications Inc., laptop computer, wireless, broadband

What is FedEx thinking when they don’t make their Super Bowl commercial available to watch???  You can go to the FedEx Web site and watch a 7.22 minute making of the pigeon commercial.  They need help!

Source – NY Times In a Culture of Independence, Bloomberg Could Skip the Party On Sunday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg flatly ruled out an independent run for president in 2012. On Monday, he appeared at the national unveiling in New York of No Labels, a group that aspires to build a grass-roots movement for political independents and independent-minded voters in both parties, and talked again about loosening the grip of both parties on the political process. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Monday in New York at the first event of No Labels, an independent political group. If Mr. Bloomberg’s denial is Shermanesque, then his behavior seems more Perot-like. It’s possible that Mr. Bloomberg is discouraging his supporters because he really has closed the door on a presidential run. It’s also possible, though, that he understands something about the modern political culture that many of those speculating about the purpose of No Labels do not — that an independent not only no longer needs to spend time encouraging the formation of a party organization to run for president, but he’s also probably better off without one. Mr. Bloomberg brought some star power to the inaugural No Labels convention at Columbia University, which also featured speakers like Joe Scarborough, Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida and a smattering of congressmen and senators. No Labels aspires to become a counterweight to ideological groups like MoveOn.org and the Tea Party movement — a network of activists devoted to pushing politicians from both parties toward a nonpartisan consensus on vital issues. It’s something of an odd conceit, given the decentralized way powerful grass-roots movements generally come together these days. After all, MoveOn.org and the Tea Party groups sprang up organically and in a decentralized way, embraced by angry citizens circulating online petitions and holding rallies. By contrast, No Labels was created by two Washington consultants, the Democratic fund-raiser Nancy Jacobson and the Republican image-shaper Mark McKinnon, and its slick opening event featured throngs of journalists, free boxed lunches and a song written for the occasion by the pop sensation Akon. The group’s slogan, printed on T-shirts and banners, summarizes its purpose this way: “Not left. Not right. Forward.” Mr. Bloomberg — wearing a tie that was appropriately neither red nor blue, but a tasteful purple — took a muted role in the day’s proceedings, appearing on a crowded panel to discuss the dry details of reforming the electoral process. The low profile reflected a sensitivity among the mayor and the organizers about suggestions that No Labels might yet become a vehicle for Mr. Bloomberg’s supposed presidential ambitions. Some commentators have speculated that No Labels could even form the basis of a serious third party, with the mayor at the helm, something America hasn’t seen since Ross Perot’s Reform Party collapsed from a long internal power struggle in 2000. Such conjecture, however, misunderstands the essential dynamic that’s reshaping our politics — a dynamic that may also be central to understanding Mr. Bloomberg’s thinking. It conflates two related but distinctly different phenomena: the cyclical nature of third-party movements (like the Reform Party or Ralph Nader’s Green Party) on one hand, and the rise of independents on the other. Third parties, at least since the advent of the Republicans in the 1850s, have generally been vehicles for making statements or for pushing the parties in an ideological direction. The Progressive Party, the States’ Rights Democratic Party of Strom Thurmond, the Socialists and the Libertarians — all of these 20th-century uprisings managed, for a time, to field candidates who affected the national debate. But none came especially close to winning. Those who think Mr. Bloomberg would want to build a similar kind of organization, be it No Labels or something else, are assuming that the growing power and disaffection of independent voters who identify with neither Democrats nor Republicans make a third party more viable than it has ever been. In fact, though, the rise of the independents represents a movement in exactly the opposite direction — away from party organizations altogether. This isn’t so much a political phenomenon as it is a cultural one. In the last decade or so, the Web has created an increasingly decentralized and customized society, in which a new generation of voters seems less aligned, generally, with large institutions. MoveOn.org and the Tea Party groups, for instance, were born as protests against the establishments of both parties, and they empowered citizens to create their own agendas, rather than relying on any elected leadership. What the current moment might offer, then, as Mr. Bloomberg surely knows, is an unprecedented opportunity not for a new party, but for an independent candidate who represents a break from the dictates of any party organization, mainstream or otherwise. In the current environment, the less of a party apparatus an independent candidate carries, the better his chances of success may be. The most formidable obstacles to such candidacies have been money and ballot access. The first is easily surmountable now, as President Obama, another candidate who once scoffed at the idea of running for the White House, proved in 2008. (In Mr. Bloomberg’s case, money has never been an issue, in any event.) The other problem — running the obstacle course of state-based laws intended mostly to keep outsider candidates out of the process — remains formidable, even in the Internet age. But such a signature-gathering effort is far easier to organize now, through online communities, than it was even in Mr. Perot’s day. All of this might just explain why Mr. Bloomberg would reject the idea of running in 2012 while at the same time continuing to level a candidatelike critique of the status quo in Washington. Since he wouldn’t need to build a party organization in the way Mr. Perot did in 1992, Mr. Bloomberg can wait considerably longer — perhaps even until the 2012 primaries — to assess whether a campaign might be viable. In the meantime, ruling himself out as a candidate only enhances his credibility as a national reformer. No Labels, then, should probably be seen as the advocacy group for bipartisan cooperation that its organizers say it is, rather than as the basis for a third-party campaign. The country may or may not need such a platform. The billionaire mayor surely does not. #politics #politicsbloomberg #election2012 #NoLabels #republican #NoLables #NoLabels #democrats