Waking up in the new world order of entrepreneurship

Skip,

I know by now you are thinking I'm a bit crazy as a loon, but it's all part of my learning curve as I try to get a grip on everything that's happened on the web in the last four years. I feel like I've been asleep and when I went to sleep it was "The web" and all you had to do was build a great site and drive traffic and put advertising on it and have great customer service and you'd make money. And that was the case and that's what I did with landandfarm.com and I sold it and made a little money and gave most of that away to my ex-wife, the government and my brother, in that order.

Everything was changed when I "woke up" 6 weeks ago when I realized that I had to get a job or start a company and it was not "the web". I don't know what "the web" is anymore. There is the "social network". There is the "web of physical things". There is the "mobile web". Al Gore's joke about inventing the internet is ancient history. Like, REALLY. ANCIENT. HISTORY. This is a world where your local doctor doesn't even have a smart phone, but the drop-out punk on the street corner panhandling is the Foursquare Mayor of the most expensive eatery in Davis Square. There is the world where rural Realtors(tm) whom I taught how to use AOL email now have automated twitter spam-bots that send out property listings to 100 different social networks automatically every night. I sometimes wonder if some of those brokers are dead and their web services continue to operate automatically, forever spewing out discounted lot deals onto the free social web services, blocked and filtered at every end-point and thus never being traced back to their origin to discover that Elber Potts, connected-Realtor(tm), died of a coronary in his garage in 2009 while fixing his riding lawnmower.

Everything changed. The local dog groomer no longer needs to buy Adwords because Yelp is all she needs for marketing. The local coffee shop owner has 15,000 followers on Twitter (and doesn't have even 500 real customers) while the local convenience store sells flash drives at the counter. The wine store has a SCVNGR QR code on the front door and an automated Group-on, Twilio-enabled phone messaging system so that you can pre-order Kazakh brandy before it shows up in product marketing on Entourage and watch it on your mobile device as it leaves Astana, tracked by an RFID chip and heads to you, arriving in 3 months (estimated) and the bottle of brandy has it's own fan-page on Facebook with 3,000 "likes" and if the brandy doesn't arrive before the new season of Entourage starts the case will be automatically auctioned on eBay and the funds converted to Farmville currency which the liquor store will buy from you and give you back two cases of your favorite beer.

I have had so many ideas, a new one every few minutes it seems as I've been doing a crash course on the "new web" that I feel like my brain will explode, spewing bits of meta tags and html anchor links around my home-office. and these ideas are so revolutionary that I am high like I've had cough syrup in a cup of espresso for hours after as I furiously research each one. And each idea I have, when googled, reveals a University professor in the UK who has a free version running that he and his class built in 1989 that's still running on the university mainframe and has it's own Facebook page with 100,000 "likes". And there's a venture back seed fund around the technology and everyone not only knows all about it, they are all onto the next big thing. And the new services I think of and the new ideas I have aren't really so new. They are old. Old, like more than 12 months old. Old, like more than 5 months old. The phrase "that's so last year" fits well and the tween version "that's so 5 seconds ago" isn't so ironic; it's actually quite unnerving.

For years, I was ignoring folks who were trying to tell me about twitter and facebook and social networking and I was asleep and arrogant, thinking that I knew what was what. I knew how to make money on the web. My customers paid me REAL. CASH. MONEY. And it flowed in like a broken ATM machine. I was well-off, I traveled to Asia, to Europe. People returned my calls. But I had nothing really to stay since I was being deaf to the changing world. And so I stopped calling and so nobody called back. I was basking in the glory of my successfully exited 8 year old startup. Hah. EIGHT. YEARS. OLD. It's like a bad joke. My startup was built in VBScript, using my knowledge of Applesoft basic, which I learned in 1981 on an Apple ][+ computer in my parents basement. My sell-by date is so in the past, it's rubbed completely off and is unreadable. Now startups aren't startups past 6 months. Twitter is 4 years old. FOUR. That's younger than my kid. My child is out of date. My future children will be born out of date. Who the fuck can keep up with what's going on? AND. I. THINK. ALL. CAPS. WITH. A. PERIOD. IS. GOING. TO. DRIVE. ME. INSANE. AND. I CANT. STOP. DOING. IT.

Web design, as well, has changed. It used to be all tables and easy shit. Now it's CSS and XHTML and object-oriented, DOM model AJAX enabled bullshit that I can't understand. And by the time you read this there will be some new, awesome standard that allows more connectivity, probably with time travel so it will be out of date before it's developed.

I built one of the first blogging sites (diarypro - failure) and one of the first rent payment systems (electricrent - failure) and bought and dis-improved an early social network (bloty.com - failure) and bought and fucked up an early photo sharing site (xaqa.com - failure) finally hit it small with a property listing service. But now I can barely hack out how to link my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts in a way that won't make me look like a noob. I spent 20 minutes recently trying to undo a style change I made to my Twitter page that made the links the same color as the background so I couldn't actually see them. And I have a blogging site or rather I have about twenty because I keep registering at various sites like blogger and tumblr and myspace and I can't remember which is which and if I should have a personal blog and a business blog so that the content doesn't get mixed up or two personal ones, one for my friends and one for my family or maybe three personal ones so I can separate my friends who knew me when I was young and carefree and those that know me now or four personal sites so I can be friends with all my ex-girlfriends and keep them from my awesome current girlfriend who doesn't want my exes sending me flowers on facebook and who may or may not still have a thing for me even though I'm pretty sure they all are married and have kids and have 5,000 followers on Twitter and have crowd-sourced their own blog page design so it looks totally awesome and feels all web 3.0.

I feel like I'm so late to the party that the hosts cleaned up, got older, had kids, left town and sold the house to a developer who tore it down and put up a condo development that's half-built, half-sold and sitting abandoned at the end of a cul-de-sac in a gated community and when I come by with my bottle of wine to give to the host, I'm greeted with a QR Code that I can scan for loyalty points that can be redeemed when I visit the next open house and after I download the real estate developer QR code reader app I have to register and while I'm trying to enter the same password i use for EVERY. SINGLE. SITE. I drop the bottle of wine and then drop my phone into the puddle of broken glass an wine and cut my hand trying to fish it out.

And holy shit there are SO. MANY. STARTUPS. It used to take balls and gumption and a fearless desire to work for yourself to start your own company. Now it's a required course at the local community college. And to make my brain sizzle and burn at the edges just a little more some much-more-successful-than-me entrepreneur started 500startups.com which is jammed packed full of awesomely design hot hot hot super api-enabled, networked sites with twit/face-linkage a-go-go and seed-round funding and A and B round funding and Omega/Zeta/Tau round funding and a board full of people who sold their first web startups in 1965 and repeated that feat every year until last week when they won the "80 under 80" lifetime achievement award for entrepreneurial achievement from the Never Heard of It Foundation Of Super Successful Folks in Warm Weather Climates. And I should know who these people are. And I don't.

Starting-up is now a viral phenomenon. Everyone has a startup. Because every blog is essentially a publishing startup. Every twitter account is a mobile startup. Everything is a startup. You can get seed round funding for choosing the right hashtag and going viral with a video-enabled tweet.

In 2006, Twitter launched. 2006! Can you believe it? My youngest son is older than that!

And this entire rant was supposed to be the pre-amble to describe what I want to do with hyper-local marketing and propose a new start-up using some of the new technology that's out there, but I'm a bit fried....

Bloty.com launched - QR code fun

I recently launched Version 1 of http://www.bloty.com. This is a QR code generator that shortens urls and creates a QR code for the url.

When scan a QR code (using your smart phone - download a QR Code reader like Shop Savvy for Android), Bloty will store the time of the scan and send you an email if you want.

You can create unlimited QR codes.

I'll be posting some videos of how to use QR codes in the next few weeks, plus launching some more features.

Financial Modeling Tutorial

After ignoring my financial modeling tutorial for nearly a decade, I have done a spit-shine and moved the spreadsheets to Google Docs.

It's actually pretty good at explaining the basic differences between an income statement, a cashflow statement and a balance sheet and even delves a little bit into depreciation.

I may start another site called "WTF is a bond?" but still mulling the idea.

Steve's Financial Modeling Tutorial

When did google start revealing it's adsense share?

I just had to sign up for a new adsense account because my old company took mine (thanks!) and whatever.

So on my new account I saw this:

AdSense for Content: ca-pub-xxxxxxxxxxxx64268 68 % publisher revenue share

Well, what do  you know? Google is not taking 50% or 66% of the revenue, they are sharing 2/3 with me!

Woot!

I am the home page on LinkedIn

I have been asked why my LinkedIn profile is http://www.linkedin.com/in/index - why does it have "index" at the end instead of my name?

Linkedin offers users the option of creating a unique landing page url.  The user chooses a word, which is suppended to "http://www.linkedin.com/in/".

Well, I was a very early linkedin user and when LinkedIn offered me the opportunity to enter any word as my profile page url, I decided to be cute and use "index" thinking it would be reserved or blocked. But lo and behold it was not and now it's what it is.

However, I now realize that when someone sees that url they think I've mistyped my profile page.  Typical me-move, eh? Trying to be cute, I hosed myself. Doh!

Will Facebook Go The Way of AOL?

There was a time when AOL was the internet.  I remember when AOL could sell keywords for content. So Bank of America had to pay AOL bucoup bucks to own the keyword for "home banking" (I don't know if they did or not, it's just an example).  Then the internet arrived and mozilla and Netscape and all the aol users had to browse the internet with a crappy browser inside AOL and then everyone dropped AOL.

Will someone develop an application that mimics Facebook outside of the Facebook website? Wouldn't it be great to be able to right-click (or for Mac users just click) on the screen and your friends would be in a drop-down?  Networking right from the operating system, no browser needed? Or is this no longer necessary since the browser itself will one day go away and the internet will be the operating system?

Facebook Privacy Settings

Let's assume that Facebook wishes to take all of your private information and sell it to foreign hackers bent on stealing everything you own. Yet you still want to use Facebook.  You can set privacy settings on Facebook to make the eventual financial raping of your personal assets less likely.  More importantly, the foreign hackers will steal someone else's bank accounts and take out mortgages in someone else's name before yours.

First, click on "privacy settings" under the Account tab on your Facebook page. (click image to see link)

Facebook has at least two different versions of the privacy settings page.  And Facebook seems to reset privacy settings. (You think I'm lying? I have screenshots)

Therefore, you will need to revisit the privacy settings occasionally.

VERSION 1:

VERSION 2

Next, you need to set the privacy for individual items.  All items should be "Friends only" expect for a few which you should customize to "Only me".

Next you need to modify how applications and websites can use your information. I say "your information" with a bit of irony since basically once you put something on Facebook, it becomes Facebook's information, even though it should not be this way.  In fact, you really have no rights at all.  Once your information is on Facebook, you are PWNED! by Facebook, n00b.

The first part of the application section allows you turn on or off individual applications or all applications. Now I'd have to be pretty dense to think that turning off all appplications in Facebook is likely for anyone. I mean, why use Facebook if you can't send someone a fuzzy flower or engage in farming?  Nevertheless, the right thing to do is turn off as much as possible.

Then set the Game and application activity to "only me".  Why should even your friends know you are playing Scramble at work? What if a co-worker is friended or a friend of a co-worker?  You didn't think of that, didya?

Ok, this next one is very VERY important.  Do not allow your friends' applications to share your information with the application.  If you allow your friends' applications access to your info, you are sharing your info with computer web developers all over the world.  Frank in Tulsa and Hadji in Pakistan both appreciate seeing your personal information.

Uncheck EVERYTHING. Your friends could easily sign up for an application called "f0reign hakkerz steel from N00bz" or something.  Your friends are nice people, but we both know they lack common sense.


And the next one as well is VERY important.  If don't uncheck this box, you are basically saying, "Hey, Facebook, we don't give a flying rat's patootie where you send our information, just make sure it gets into the wrong hands. Thanks."

Finally, we confirm that the world can't crawl into our online skivvies and do a digital prostate exam.