Last night, we saw the movie “Milk”. Sean Penn delivers yet another truly mesmerizing performance. The only knock against the movie was that we felt it was probably 15 minutes too long but as a filmmaker myself, I completely understand how difficult it would have been for Mr. Van Sant to cut those 15 minutes.
What was really cool about the story was how great an example of a grass roots movement Milk’s political life was and on the way home, I asked my wife the question: “What could Harvey Milk have done with the Internet?”
As this question jumped around my head while taking my morning shower today (my best place for ideas jumping around my head), I thought that maybe we got a glimpse of what Milk could have accomplished with the Internet through Obama and how he used that medium to propel himself to the White House… although if Milk was living today, I’m sure he would have been just a wee bit more ‘out there’ in his execution.
Another striking realization that this movie provoked was how we’re still fighting the same cultural gay rights fight 30+ years later… and that’s kinda sad. Anyway, if you want to see who wins best Male lead acting Oscar before the awards show, check out Milk.
Sonia Simone, through her email list over at Remarkable Communication, emailed out a very neat little business plan document. It’s a two page document that will help you focus your business idea… basically a “back of the envelope” business plan that isn’t intimidating at all.
You can download it by clicking the following link (Word doc download): remarkablysimplebusinessplan. Thanks Sonia!
MenwithPens.ca is the company that we hired to work with us on designing the look/feel, backend programming and layout of our website for “The Business”.
After interviewing a number of different developers and seeing what they offered, we felt that Men with Pens was the best fit for us. Interestingly, they don’t “do” the phone… all communication with them has been via email… back and forth, back and forth during the “courting” process and it wasn’t until we were comfortable enough with them and until they figured out how to pull off what we wanted (cause we want to do some pretty cool and unique stuff with our site) that we pulled the trigger and formalized the working relationship.
In addition to our emails, they had us fill out a design questionnaire that asked for our likes and dislikes, design preferences and the like.
You might be surprised by the fact that they don’t “do” the phone but we found the process to be very fluid and exact as sometimes things get lost in translation in conversation but via email, being specific is easy since you have a detailed list of what was said before.
So there you have it… we’ll be seeing some work next week and we’ll let you know how that turns out.
What is that old adage?… “You gotta spend money to make money.”?… yeah, that’s it.
Well, we’ve taken that step and started to spend money on “The Business”. We’ve hired two different companies to work on two different parts of The Business and we’re very excited about moving forward.
Up until the point that you press that buy button or write that check, any new business idea is just that… an idea. But when you write that first check, The Business becomes more real… and scarier too. Sure, we could have probably configured our business idea and model on the cheep but then we wouldn’t have a competitive advantage or unique product/service… and we wouldn’t be able to charge more.
So we’re taking a risk with our own money in the most difficult economic environment since the Great Depression and it feels good. We’re really happy with the partners we’ve chosen and I’ll be blogging about how we picked them and what it’s like working with them shortly… stay tuned.
When I’ve written about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) before on this blog, the writing usually revolves around returning soldiers from either Iraq or Afghanistan.
Today is different.
Today, I’m writing about the miraculous landing on the Hudson that occurred on January 15th in frigid cold weather and water. Last night, CBS profiled the captain, co-pilot, crew and passengers and below is the video from that segment… if you missed it, take a look and believe me when I say it’s worth watching.
After that segment aired, the co-pilot conducted an interview with TheStreet.com. What I found very interesting about that interview was how the co-pilot said that the best help that he got after getting out of the river was from his union, USAPA (U. S. Airline Pilots Association), in how they helped to treat his post-traumatic stress from the incident.
In the interview conducted by 60 Minutes, Captain Sully also mentions his symptoms of PTSD by recounting his not being able to sleep and running through the event over and over again, just like his co-pilot, trying to figure out what he could have done differently and better… and this was when everyone on that aircraft got out alive, all 155 people.
This is a prime example of how PTSD can take control of someone even when everything turned out to be a “miracle”… now just imagine how a returning soldier from Iraq or Afghanistan feels when soldiers died under his leadership? This is a tough disease that we need to stay on top of… in good stories and bad.
Namely, this “old” model is “free”… to charge you nothing for the service or product being offered in hopes of either getting enough traffic to generate ad sales revenue or when they have enough of a following hopefully a big company will come along and buy them.
YouTube is an example of a company not making any money but commanded an extremely high valuation when it was sold to Google based on the number of users in their community. This is changing.
Given the current economic environment, no company is going to pay for another company with no cash flow no matter how many ‘users’ they have.
With the expansion of broadband, the Internet has become a superb distribution channel combined with superb interaction and community building characteristics. What this does is create many new markets for products, information and services never thought of before because there was no way to reach such very specific niches.
Being able to reach that niche is the key to “The Business”. Developing information via our expertise to sell to our niche is what we’re in the process of doing right now.
Since FREE is dying a slow death, what information or expertise do you have that you could sell via the Internet? Jump in, the water’s fine…
