Ejovi Nuwere

I’ve been investigating “start page” companies for work. I think they are awesome ideas, a website that helps you organize your life in a way that portal pages have failed. They let you truly customize your page in its look, the positioning of windows and what exactly is displayed. It’s a really cool service but for the love of me I haven’t figured out how these guys are going to make money? Can you sell a company that has a custom start page to a larger company? Would the larger company replace their start page? How many users would you need to have to make it worth while? If no one is going to acquire you how do you…I don’t know…make money? Advertising?

* Live.com - Microsofts smooth looking start page
* Google Homepage - Google another start page but with lots of plugins.
* Protopage - Can be a little overwhelming, but interesting take on the concept.
* Pageflakes - Looks cool, easy to navigate.
* Netvibes - One of the most popular. Martin V., and a group of other famous entrepenuers invested in this

There is another 5 or so that I’ve found that all basicly do the same thing. Recently some really smart people have invested in these companies so I think they must know something I don’t. If anyone has any ideas let me know.

Other then that, one company I like is Ning.com it’s not really a start page. It’s almost like a portal in a box. You can create and brand your own craiglists, or your own dating website. I think this is a model that has potential because many organizations and groups that want these types of applications and portals will never have the resources to develop them. I first learned of the company from Marc Andressen its founder. Marc is also the founder of Netscape, awesome guy.

Today I found SquareSpace it looks like a really cool content management service that is moduler and allows you to setup blogs or intregrate other functionality into your hosted website without having to worry about how to make different features blend or work together. It reminds me of what TypePad offers to corporate customers in their “blog infrastructure in a box” service. This would be a product independant version of that.

Today I went to see Spike Lee’s new film Inside Man and I loved it. I’ve always loved Spike Lee’s cinematography style but I haven’t been too excited about all of his films. When I worked for him as a teenager I learned not only about the film industry in general but specifically about how he works. For example there are a number of things you will always see in his films. Some of them I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t worked for him.

He always uses children in his film. They are usually first time actors or picked off the street from the neighborhood the film is made in.

He has a fascination with construction / hard labor workers and tries to place them at least once in the movie.

One or two of his production staffs are always prominently featured in the film. In Inside Man the Hispanic security guard who has a speaking role at the start of the film works on Spike’s staff. I know because I used to work with him! Though their may be others I don’t know.

When characters are in a highly emotional state they appear to be floating. He uses this technique in all of his films. The actor is standing on a trolley and rails. Then he is pushed with the camera focused on his face. Very low tech and simple technique that’s super powerful.

So I enjoyed watching it and highly recommend others to go out and see it. It brought back old memories of when I worked for him and hopefully some day soon I’ll be able to tell Spike in person how important it was to have worked with him.

Here is a video of a kid who looks to be about 12 playing Pachelbel’s Canon in a way that amazes me. It has amazed a lot of other people too. More than 1.2 million people have viewed his video since it was uploaded two days ago.

There is a lesson to be learned from this kids success. In the entire video you can’t see the kids face. You have no idea who he is. You know that he is amazing, you can hear it, you can see him working his magic but how can we give him credit? In his 5 minutes of fame he has probably lost more then he has gained all because he never figured 1.2 million people would want to see him play guitar.

This is what happens when we sell ourselves short. We keep our heads down and work hard and assume people will notice. This isn’t the way the world works. To some extent we know this, but the alternative is harder. Sometimes we don’t prepare for success because we never really believe it will happen. If this kid really believed he would be an amazing success he would have created a home page with a mailing list and eventually a CD. The home page would have been clearly listed at the beginning and ending of the video and he would have more then 10K fans subscribed to it right now.

So let this be a lesson. If you are skilled and talented, show your face, keep your head up and assume success will come knocking. Don’t be the faceless kid in the video.

Or what do you want to be? A link from Martin Williams:

At the bottom, in terms of size, income, wealth and opportunity, are the “be-yourown-boss” business owners. These are people who started or bought, start or buy businesses in order to give themselves a good job, without an annoying boss. Often, this is someone who has been working in an identical or similar business: the employed restaurant manager buys a sub shop franchise; a car mechanic buys a muffler shop; a carpet cleaner prints up business cards and starts his own one-man operation. These
people often never expand their businesses, continuing to do the same job they were doing, behaving as a worker, certainly not as an entrepreneur. In short, self-employment is not necessarily entrepreneurship.

On the next level is the small business owner. He may enter business with bigger goals, and is typically quicker, even eager to have employees doing the ground-level work while he focuses on the marketing and management of the business. However, if you meet this fellow and ask him what he does, and he says ‘I own a jewelry store’, if you meet up with him again 12, 24 or 36 months later, his business will still be a jewelry store, largely unchanged. By his very definition of his business, he rules out all sorts of expansive opportunities. By his tunnel vision, he precludes many activities.

At the top of the financial pyramid, the entrepreneur. Even though he, too, might own a jewelry store, he might say ‘I’m in the jewelry business’, and 36 months later, he will still own his jewelry store but may also have satellite mini-stores in three malls, a
thriving web site and mail-order business, a high-end custom jewelry business, a diamond brokerage, and be selling a week-long trip to South Africa for $25,000.00 per person, where they pick out their diamond at the mines. Unlike the business owner, this
entrepreneur has broad, wide, open vision, thinks bigger, and avoids too narrowly defining himself.

http://www.renegademillionaire.com/articles/article2.htm