March 15, 2008
I had planned a couple of posts about an amazing trip I enjoyed yesterday. About how being able to spend time on a school field trip with one of my kids all day yesterday has to be the absolute best of the seriously kickass benefits I reap as an entrepeneur.
Thing is…
The trip yesterday? We visited the World of Coca-Cola and the Georgia Aquarium. In downtown Atlanta.
At around 10a EST yesterday, I was pointing out landmarks like the CNN Center, Philips Arena, and the Georgia Dome for the first time to my child.
I was able to show where Running Antelope and I had eaten lunch at the Sundial, the rotating restaurant atop the Westin, a while back.
12 hours later, that whole area was torn up by a tornado…the first ever to hit downtown Atlanta.
Luckily, our group was leaving Atlanta by 7p. Very luckily, as Friday rush hour out of Atlanta was not only uneventful, but surprisingly quick. Which meant we were well out of harm’s way. Luckily.
But that doesn’t change the fact that nobody down there in downtown expected it, least of all our group.
We dodged one right there. Lucky, lucky us.
|| posted by chris under epiphany, travel || comments (1) ||
||
February 25, 2008
AKA Trust Is For Suckers
I have clipart of a server room on my web page, so I must know what I’m talking about!
Trust is a funny thing.
Some people won’t trust anything they have to pay for. Other people distrust anything that has the word Free attached to it.
Here’s the thing about that…
Free Is Never Really Free
As in, everyone has an ulterior motive. I don’t care who they are, or what they are doing, everyone gets something for what they spend their time doing.
It doesn’t matter whether that something is money or not. Someone might just want to become the “It” girl for small business IT. Why?
Because things happen after that. Doors get opened. Opportunities, good or not, arise.
I’ll tell you this…
The more someone screams about how independent they are, the more likely it is that they are being comped somehow, somewhere, by somebody. And they are desperately worried that fact will be revealed.
The wizard never wants you to look behind the curtain. Because all you’ll see is one guy, overworked and paranoid, desperately trying to be something more than he really is…
Which is a humbug.
|| posted by chris under business, clueless, epiphany, freebie, thumbs down || comments (3) ||
||
January 18, 2008
A whole heaping pile of electronic equipment that won’t be eating up precious landfill space or poisoning the environment, that’s what!
Instead, we’re talking tons (literally!) of reclaimed industrial plastics, metal, glass and other components that will be re-used, rather than wasted.
E-Cycling Day, the event sponsored by our local Chamber of Commerce AND the one I’ve been fortunate enough to chair, has all the earmarks of a runaway success.
And we’re still nearly a week away from the public collection day!
Interest in E-Cycling Day completely skyrocketed! Statewide media outlets have been contacting us for interviews, quotes, whatever so that they can run stories about it.
The Tuscaloosa business community strongly supported E-Cycling Day from the very beginning. We received some VERY large pledges of equipment. Logistically, we found it easier to arrange for the processor to send a truck directly to those making large pledges, rather than having all that equipment showing up on the public day, potentially causing bottlenecks or delays.
Yesterday, the first couple of large pledges were picked up. And we received the tare weight of the load this morning.
27,000 POUNDS!
From just 2 companies!
Based on our best-guess projections, we are expecting to collect 200,000 pounds of electronic waste by the end of this event.
The very first time out of the gate.
So keep you fingers crossed for good weather for us on the 24th.
If you live or work in the West Alabama area, or know someone who does…PLEASE help us spread the word by telling them about it. Send them to the E-Cycling Day website for more information.
And if you’re interested in knowing how we did it, the kinds of things we learned while planning this event, and ways we found to almost guarantee our success…
Post a comment or contact me. We’d be happy to talk to folks who want to try to replicate what we’ve managed to do in their area.
And I can tell you this.
You think community involvement is for saps? That there’s no tangible benefit?
Being directly involved with this event has already quadrupled my business in 2008. I expect it to grow even more and faster, thanks to my involvement with E-Cycling Day.
I don’t care who you are or what you are doing…
No marketing-in-a-box toolkit, no matter how good the package looks, will do that for you.
I also get the added bonus of helping save the environment to boot.
Now that’s WIN-WIN baby!
|| posted by chris under business, community, epiphany, freebie, hardware, media, more cowbell, thumbs up || comments (6) ||
||
November 13, 2007
When Mr. “More British Than British” Simon Cowell can’t say anything even remotely ass-like about you…
You’re headed for greatness.
|| posted by chris under epiphany, more cowbell, thumbs up || comments (0) ||
||
November 5, 2007
For those of you hiding under rocks…
There was BIG HUGE NEWS in the world of mobility today, which is likely to change the landscape forever.
No…Apple didn’t announce a new iPhone.
Google finally revealed its long-rumored play in the wireless mobile market.
And boy…
It’s a DOOZY!
So, get familiar with this new acronym…
O H A
Which stands for…
Open Handset Alliance
With 33 other major players in the mobility market signed on, Google has some serious momentum, right out of the gate. What else is new, right?
To be sure, anytime just about anyone except Jimmy Joe Bob’s Computer & Bait Shop makes any kind of industry announcement, there is always a cadre of hangers-on who immediately announce…
We’re There, We’ve Always Been There, And We Are Excited About The New Red-Assed Monkey Alliance
And any alliance, in and of itself, is just a public promise not to screw each other over…
All while each respective member’s R&D department works overtime to find a ways to exploit the alliance and screw everyone else over.
That’s the tech business, pure & simple.
But there’s another gem here…
We’re talking a full open-source mobile platform, ready for folks to start cooking up alternatives to handsets running competing mobile operating systems…
-
PalmOS
-
OSX
-
Windows Mobile
-
Symbian
-
BlackberryOS
That’s a big time move, people. I’m talking a haymaker right to the jaw of those competing OS makers. You have to figure that mobile operators and OEMs are going to look long and hard at licensing fees and exclusivity agreements from here on out.
Therefore, it should come as little surprise that folks like AT&T, Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, Palm, Research in Motion and Verizon haven’t yet signed up for OHA. Of those, only AT&T and Verizon will prolly even entertain the idea of signing up as an OHA member.
The reason? The others all have invested an insane amount of resources to build the aforemention competing OS and hardware platforms. So they won’t be budging.
For fans of Windows Mobile…
The REALLY BIG NEWS in all this is the revelation of what a central role that longtime Windows Mobile handset maker extraordinaire HTC has been playing in OHA, including building a prototype, and working on OHA designs for over 2 years.
Considering that HTC was the only Windows Mobile handset OEM to get WM6 upgrades out in any reasonable timeframe…
You’ve got to figure that somewhere in Redmond, there are chairs flying into any walls within a 20~30 foot radius of Steve Ballmer.
Obviously, there is tons of coverage about OHA just about everywhere you’d care to look. Here are a couple of the better spots…
Shoutout and thanks in advance to the good folks over at Griffin Design Studio for letting the Funcave use their kickass design titled “Android,” seen at the top of this post.
|| posted by chris under beta, business, epiphany, freebie, hardware, mobility || comments (1) ||
||
