Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

Personal broadcasting: a cool app to scroll pix

Check this out – Slide was launched yesterday:

Slide is a free Windows application (Mac version coming soon!) for finding, playing, and instantly sharing photos, videos, and other media. Slide will help you group digital photos into channels to share with friends and family. It might even help you find pictures that you forgot you had.

Learn more about how it works, have a look at Channel Guide of popular public channels, or download Slide and get started!

 

Great review of The Art of the Start

Charlie: you got to the gist of it. I heard Guy Kawasaki talk back in 2000 at EuroDisney at a Tornado Insider event. He does have charisma indeed, and although his content is very simple and obvious, it’s great material. Thanks for the review of Guy’s latest book, The Art of the Start. I’m quoting some of your nuggets:

 And here are some notes I made while reading The Art of the Start:
- For partnerships, find an internal champion who can keep the partnership alive, don't use a committee. <<< Very crucial in any endeavor.
- Learn the art of schmoozing: circulate, ask good questions and listen, follow up, make it easy to get in touch, be passionate, read voraciously, give favours, return favours, ask for favours in return. <<< It's a give and take.
- Branding: simplify simplify simplify the product. <<< Yes.
- Recruit evangelists:ask, look for believers, let bloom,assign tasks and expect them to get done, nurture and support, give them tools <<< That's why I had an outreach program.
- Make sure everyone can talk the walk. <<< Every employee represents your company.
- Some fun advice on marketing shirts: Not white, little text, large fonts, make it cool, and consider kids' sizes. <<< True Kawasaki Wisdom
- Seminars for lead generation. <<< This ties back, somewhat, to the Marketing Sucks recommendations.

Now playing: Mashuptown.com - Mash the Casbah

So what's your favourite post on this blog ?

 Come on, let me know what you think!

What is it you like on this blog, what category, what style, what post ?

Reply in the comments, and the winner is …

Now playing: Mashuptown.com - We Will Rock and Roll You.....

The art of deal making

 Tomorrow is my last day with glowria basically because that’s the destiny of an interim CEO: interim.

I’ll update this post at some point with more detail of what we have achieved in the past 8 months, but I first would like to thank all the team at glowria for coping with me over all this time and producing these wonderful results in which I take pride:

• we now have a record marginal contribution per subscriber, allowing us to invest even more in our catalogue in the future, in better customer service, and in our future growth;


• we raised another 4 million euros of equity with SPEF Ventures last June;


• we launched a complete new web site last february, offering the same shopping experience to customers and prospects; you might actually not notice it, but improvements go online every thursday night;


• our catalogue now includes more than 8,000 titles (the largest on the French market – no porn), with over 250,000 copies (largely enough to satisfy demand) we are making them available to our customers by the day (a small counter on the site shows it)


• our VOD service is up and running in beta. Expect it to launch commercially soon


• and finally, we have made some extraordinary deals which will help grow the business super fast.

Someday I’ll have to tell you about how those deals were made, and without putting them into context, I’ll give you a hint at why tenacity, and very very strong focus will help you win in the marketplace (if you haven’t yet read Winning by Jack Welch, get a copy):

• we decided back when I started, exactly how much time we wanted to spend on fund raising, and gave ourselves a final deadline, ready to put all the resources in play; thanks to our team, our new investor’s team and all our support network, we had the money in the bank the day before the deadline ! waow!


• we heard competition had signed a major deal with a big player. A battle is never lost until the last breath. Without more details, I am glad to report we got their position and are developping a beautiful partnership with the player;


• we also heard competition’s contract with someone else was up for renewal: we put all our efforts behind the chasing race, and finally got the deal from them. yes!


• we heard another major player was also selecting two partners for a new service, and that the two new partners had already been screened and approved. By now you already know we fought with our hearts and souls, and replaced one of them. Using creativity, flexibility, speed and commitment, you can really create miracles;


• and finally, we launched a very long shot 6 months ago with a huge player. Enormous. I’ll link back to this note when it becomes public. One day from my final deadline, tonight, I got the green light from them. We’re in.

That’s 5 strikes. I’m not saying there weren’t others, nor that we might have missed some deals. I’m saying we won each one we committed ourselves to win. General Patton used to say something like this: “An OK strategy executed now with brutal force is better than an excellent strategy executed next week.” Preparation is fundamental, I can’t stress it enough, but execution is key. The French say: “gouverner, c’est choisir” (to govern is to choose); a CEO’s role is also that: weigh options, and decide, so that execution can follow.

The art of deal making ? The art of war.

 

Get Opera browser for free! TODAY ONLY

Just spotted this on the Download squad: (update: also on OSNews and Slashdot)

“Want to get the Opera browser without the annoying embedded ads? Usually, it'll cost you $39. But today, and today only, Opera Software is offering the full version for free. The giveaway is part of the program's 10th Birthday celebration. Whether you love Opera, hate it, or haven't even bothered to try it, now's your chance to give it a shot. Just hurry; at midnight (PT) tonight, the price goes back up.”

and in the comments you will read:

“ After downloading and installing, you must go to http://my.opera.com/community/party/reg.dml and, in exchange for your e-mail address (or somebody else's for that matter), you get your very own make-the-banner-ads-disappear registration code. ”

which will give you several codes for several OS: Windows, Linux Intel, Linux PowerPC, Linux Sparc, FreeBSD, Solaris and Mac! Too bad I can’t download a copy for my Nokia 7710 smartphone.

Now playing: Adam Curry - Daily Source Code for Monday August 29th 2005 #230

Blogjet 1.6 beta 1 out

Hey… I’ve found that there is a Blogjet beta out there that solves a few of my problems:

• I get a date/time confusion on Typepad!

Other stuff I’d like:

• a QUOTE function that indents the quoted text and sets it to italic
• a format button to cross out old test
• format buttons to indent
• an easier way to add trackbacks instead of going to the properties tab
• a default wrap around the image function
• a way to sort alphabetically all the categories (they kind of show up in a weird order)
• a way to download locally all messages instead of pulling them off the web everytime (a windows version of NetNewsWire ?)
• there’s a bug with adding the ‘now playing’ section at the bottom of each post. It keeps on adding new ones instead of replacing old ones

So here’s the post on the forum:

 The new beta version of BlogJet available. Please note that this version is for testing purposes only.
 
Download (2.1 MB)
http://blogjet.com/beta/BlogJetSetup16b1.exe
 
RELEASE NOTES (incomplete)
 
Features
 
    * Group posting (post to multiple blogs at once).
    * Confirm posting using Ctrl+Enter (optional).
    * NTLM authentication support.
    * Better file upload progress indication.
    * Abort posting when checking spelling.
 
Bug fixes
 
    * Work-around for WordPress and TypePad date/time issue.
    * Fixed 'Cannot focus a disabled or invisible window'.
    * New connection core.
    * Lots of other bug fixes…

Now playing: Adam Curry - Daily Source Code for Tuesday August 30th 2005 #231

Who was born on the same day as you ?

Inspired by this post on Jeff’s blog (it’s his Birthday today!), you can actually check who was born on the same day as you on Wikipedia. So here goes my day :

• 1554 - Pope Gregory XV (d. 1623)
• 1908 - Simone de Beauvoir, French author (d. 1986)
• 1913 - Richard Nixon, 37th President of the United States (d. 1994)
• 1941 - Joan Baez, American singer and activist
• 1959 - Rigoberta Menchú, Guatemalan writer (and Nobel Peace Prize laureate)

So… let me throw out a little quizz out to you (updated).

Say you are in the middle of a crowd and everyone takes turns to say when her/his birthday is, out loud. How many people does it take for the probability of someone else to have the same birthday as you a previous person to exceed 50% ?

Again,

• person 1 says born on xx
• person 2 says born on yy
• …

at what person number will the probability of that person having the same birthday as you a previous person exceed 50% ?

(updated because of Fred's comment below)

Fun comparing keywords on the blogosphere: blogpulse

Just tried to check what the Blogosphere is saying about Google Eath for instance. You can of course also compare that result to another keyword, here Virtual Earth. Give it a try!

HBO on demand...

Just noticed that the new TV craze in the US seems to be “Rome” ! And something I hadn’t noticed yet: a major network is also distributing its content on demand, right at the same time as TV ? Anyone has tried it yet ?

Layout of my blog has disappeared

 Just tried to do a domain name mapping directly on typepad’s back-office.

I guess I did everything right with the domain name servers, and just republished the site, and it looks like…

So something went wrong. Basically I’m trying to map http://www.sepulveda.net to http://rodrigo.typepad.com.

Anyways, any hint appreciated. Thanks!

Update: OK, I’m struggling with my DNS settings, and here is a good resource: DNS Oversimplified.

Update2: the typepad site says: “You've just completed all of the steps to map the domain www.sepulveda.net to your weblog (Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz). While the process on TypePad's end takes about two hours to complete, the process on your registrar's end can take 24-48 hours.”

Right, I didn’t read that 2 hours thing… Let’s see what happens later then…

Update: well, still not solved. Jeff Clavier is giving me a hand: he’s an angel with ultraDNS, hence knows a bit about this stuff. So I’m back to my previous state. I’m going to try another set of config, so expect some more broken CSS…

Now playing: Adam Curry - Daily Source Code for Tuesday August 30th 2005 #231