Finding Free WiFi

If You Offer Free WiFi, Steal This

We were in the bay area last week, and after a meeting near Berkeley we stopped at a coffee shop to get some work done.  Actually...we planted outside of a Teriyaki joint.  Quickly.  See the image below.  This is what popped up when I logged into their wifi network.  They asked for my email, warned me that it the network wasn't safe to send important data, told me about their restaurant, ran some ads.  Etc.  Etc.  Etc.  Very cool, I learned how Quickly started.  Stuck with me enough to post it, and if I'm ever in that area again you can bet that's the restaurant I'll remember.

Dear every coffee shop in the nation...why don't you do this?

I hope you've seen this

The guys at JibJab are the kings of satire:

Write That Down

"Nothing kills a great idea like sitting down and thinking about it"
---Brent Lamphier, July 2008.

Had a conversation with a budding entrepreneur the other day, and this was the advice I ended up giving.  He'd been incubating his idea off and on for a number of years.  Eventually, you have to stop thinking about it and just try to make the dang thing work.  Good luck to him and good luck to you.

How to Bootstrap Silicon Valley

Last month, after the UW Business Plan Competition, we were selected to pitch at the DFJ Venture Challenge in the valley.  When I found out we'd been selected by the partners as the 'wild card,'  I was in Ohio for my grandparents 65th wedding anniversary. 

Thus began our adventure in spending as little money as possible in the valley while meeting with as many people as possible.  The adventure:

Day 0 -Find out we're selected.  Rapidly change plane ticket to get back to Seattle.
Day 1- UW pays to fly us down there.  Awesome- Travel Cost- $0.
Fly into Oakland so that our VP of Marketing, a Berkely undergrad, can steal a car from his brother.  His brother picks us up, we drop him off, and head across the bay to Palo Alto.
Sleep in the Sheraton...1 night compliments of UW.  Awesome. 
Day 2- Head to Sand Hill Road for the DFJ Challenge.  Intense day.  16 Competing teams, all winners of the Big California Schools (UW was invited for the first year) business plan competition and two wild cards (including us).  Everyone gave a 5 minute pitch with 5 minutes Q&A in the morning.  6 companies selected for the finals, a 15 minute pitch with 15 Q&A in the afternoon.  We were honored to be in the finals.

At this point most teams headed home, including the other team from UW.  We, however, with our free plane ticket to Silicon Valley, didn't want to waste it.  So began the boostrapping adventure.

Step 1:  Get dropped off at a Mountain View Coffee Shop around 6:00.  In Suits and carrying our luggage.  We get back to work.  Below us a hippie rock band plays (we look quite out of place in suits).

 Sit at coffee shop for 4 hours.  Until they close.  Waiting for Mountain View couch we're sleeping on to get back from downtown San Fran.  Get kicked out of coffee shop for closing.  Sit on outside table of a closed restaurant for 1 hour, waiting.  Buy beer from local corner store.

Mountain View friend happens to be moving, so there is one small couch and a little bit of floor space.  I get the floor.  Awesome.

Next day, invited back to DFJ to demo our product.  Take CalTrain from Mountain View to Palo Alto.  Don't pay for ticket. In our Silicon Valley nievity, we think we'll be ok without a car (returned to brother) to get across Stanford's campus to Sand Hill road in two hours.  Wow.  Bad idea.  Take pictures with phone of campus so we don't get lost (it seems much, much bigger than UW).  This is only one picture.  In the next picture you can see Sand Hill road to the FAR right.

An hour or so after getting off the CalTrain, after hiking through a ditch, we find Sand Hill Road.

Only we weren't far from the bottom of Sand Hill Road.  DFJ is at the end of it.  And it's up hill.  Arrive for delicious free lunch meeting sweaty.  Very sweaty.

The next day, we woke up to hear that a meeting we were trying to schedule could, in fact, happen...at 10:30 am.  Downtown.  We we're still in Mountain View.  Luckily have the brother's car for the day, and book it downtown.
Meet with firm, then walk...and walk...and walk...around the city to get to next meeting

Meet with guy at Google...get awesome Google lunch (you wonder why they get top talent).  Book it to Union Square.  Meet with a VC EIR on 36th floor of Hyatt for a drink (great place for a meeting for future reference)

Then drive back to Mountain View for meeting with former Yahoo exec.  Lots of driving.  THEN drive to Berkeley, where we have 2 couches to sleep on.

Crazy 3 days.  Absolutley Crazy.  Now we're going back this week, if you have a couch to sleep on let me know.

MIT Startup Demo Company Shout-Out

Last week I was honored to be a judge at the MIT (Northwest Chapter) Enterprise Forum's 'Startup Demo' Spring Event.  We won the fall demo event last year...and thus I got to see what life was like on the other side.

I was blown away by the companies...business model aside (it was a demo event...they didn't have to get into business nuts and bolts and instead simply were asked to make us go 'wow), people were building some really cool stuff.

My takes:

The Winner:

ForWord Input:

Building software that allows you to input text using handwriting methods on a QWERTY keypad interface.  Sounds weird, but the guy FLEW through the demo and only messed up once or twice...PLUS, what was the most important to me, was that even post mess-up the revision process was FAR better than anything I've ever used.

Next Step: Get 20 18 year old girls in a room, pay them each $20 for an hour and have them text all their friends using the interface.  Chart the response.  This could be big.

My Runnerup:

Interview Studio.com

Extremely well designed web service aimed at changing how people apply/interview/recruit/choose applicants for companies.  Crowded space but looks like it could be the winner.

Next Step: Figure out a big, bold solution to keep it from becoming the next Monster.com with 5,000 applicants for every job opportunity.  

In no other order:

Ameritocracy:

Political user generated content site, looking at statements, facts, reports, etc edited by the American  people. A democratized version of Obama's new website.  

Next Step: Launch today while the political trail is hot.

Diagnosis Plus

A new way using the web for people to gain more information on their chronic illnesses; helps both doctors and patients with screening and management of such diseases.

Next Step: Make the back end extremely functional while making the UI extremely simple, elegant, and obvious to people who don't generally use the computer for much more than email and photo sharing. 

Hydrovolts

Great demo by the founder.  One of those save the world companies...takes small turbines, puts them in irrigation ditches, rivers, channels etc and generates power.  Apparently a lot of power

Next Step: Test.  Generate power.  Save world.

Snowflake ITM.

The company of the fearless MIT NW leader, I call it basecamp on steroids, but really it's a dynamic task management tool.

Next Step: They seem very close to launch....launch and make money.  Figure out how to make the switch from basecamp easy.

Awesome iPhone App #1

Congrats to the guys at Urban Spoon (found via John Cook's blog), for describing the first app that I will put on my phone. 

This looks awesome.  I'm big into the amazing eclectic food throughout Seattle.

Thank you so much.

When was the last time you said thank you SO much to someone?  Not a genuine thanks or thank you, but an actually thank you sooo much?  When was the last time you said it to a customer? 

If you're like me you are genuinely extremely thankful for everyone of your customers.  Every single one.  Thank you SO much to everyone who has signed up and used Athleon.

I was at a street fair in the University District in Seattle a few weeks back.  Bought some 'fair corn.'  Delicious, and nutritious (except for the dripping butter).  And the lady who took my three dollars thanked me, very much.  She then thanked the person behind me.  Very much.  Sounded like she meant it every time.

 There were 20+ food vendors within a half a block of each other on both sides of the street.  I chose her.  She was thankful.  She should have been.  I had a lot of choices.

Online there are now 2000+ vendors.  All withink a click or two of each other, on both sides of google.  I choose you.  I hope you're thankful.  If you choose me I will be.

NOTE:  This is a picture of her tip jar.  You get one impression to get the change in my pocket... why not have some fun with it.  Well done corn lady. 

DFJ Venture Competition

Athleon made it to the finals...pretty cool.  More on this later.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/24893344/

Creativity is More Important Than Knowledge (Literacy)

"All kids have tremendous talents and we squander them...

Creativity is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat them with the same status"

Watch This:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66

Do Something Cool....but Forget to Tell People?

I ordered a $2.75 cup of coffee today.  Yes expensive but that's not the point.  The point is that I had $3.00, had 3 hours to work before a meeting downtown (I love my $1 an hour office), and bought the $2.75 cup assuming that I couldn't afford the more expensive cup...the extra change for tax would've put me over.

But wait...the price INCLUDED tax.  AWESOME.  The coffee shop, however, lost a quarter by NOT telling me that they do something cool (I wish more places told you the tax up front). 

Do you do something awesome that you just so happened to forget to tell me (or your users/customers/clients) about? 

We have killer playbook software.  For football, lacrosse, basketball, rugby, and just about any other sport.

For the first 2 months we had it we forgot to tell you about it.  Well, we told our users...but not people who came to our website.  There was nothing on the landing page about it.  It wasn't an 'oops'...we just were focused on internal development instead of spending a day or two to redesign the landing page to show the playbook.

Now it's up.  Now you can see it.  Thank goodness.  We do something cool and tell people.

What did you forget to tell me?