David Dalka attends and reports business events and conferences to discover the future of business where technology, organizations and customer exeperience meet. Also serves as emcee, moderator and motivational business keynote speaker.
Jason Jacobson at the Chicagoland Entreprenuership Center invited me to see a presentation on Microsite’s this morning by Bill Hanekamp. I left the conversation believing that microsites are an underutilized tool that help enable potentially viral and social media content. They are underutilized most in the B2B world where you do some interesting things to build traction with prospects of long-sales cycle and complex products and services.
Thanks for inviting me Jason!
See the details here. If Ojas Rege would like elaborate in an interview on this blog, it would be welcomed. Thanks!
Fred Wilson doesn’t like the Dead Pool over at Techcrunch.
A friend of mine communicated a better idea for him and other venture capitalists. Why not spend more time looking at original ideas – real detailed business plans with actual revenue models? The dead pool would be a lot smaller if people did hard work instead of chasing “existing businesses” which are little more than a web site with some content. So why not spend more time looking early stage companies that have real, independent, revenue producing business models with strong strategy? You’ll find your industry default rate will go down. Don’t know where to find these fledgling companies? Just ask me (my referral fees are quite reasonable).
I recently had an issue with an experience with Banana Republic (a division of the Gap). While they were nice enough to send me a gift card for my inconvenience, I was surprised that the letter sent with it wasn’t personalized describing the measures they would be taking to prevent it from occurring with another Banana Republic customer in the future.
From Page 52 of Time, in an article about education, December 18th, 2006: “Jobs in the new economy-the ones that won’t get outsourced or automated-“put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos,” says Marc Tucker , an author of the skills-commission report and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy.
It’s interdisciplinary combinations-design and technology, mathematics and art-“that produce Youtube and Google” , says Thomas Friedman, the best selling author of The World Is Flat.
Yet human resources, hiring managers, executive recruiters, candidate sourcers, chief marketing officers and chief financial officers haven’t yet mastered the art of finding this skill set of thought leaders seeing big picture patterns and seek out one dimensional candidates with “experience”.
What has to happen to integrate these skills into a recruiting and hiring mindset of what is this person capable of rather than a limiting belief frame of compliance? A discussion of how to recruit these types of skills more proactively is certainly welcome in 2007!
Robert Scoble held a blogger lunch with Bill Gates at the Consumer Electronics Show, the video can be viewed below and takes 42 minutes to view – I tried to embed it but that link text from Podtech doesn’t seem to be working.
Ed Kohler from Technology Evangelist wants to hear your questions about CES.
WordPress 2.0.6 released! As many of you are aware, I recently struggled with a WordPress problem that prevented me from sending outbound trackbacks. Due to Stephan Spencer’s help, I was able to finally locate a problem which dozens of other people had tried to locate but could not.
What was this problem? It turned out to be quite simple, I had a dead pinging URL entry in my Options>Writing>Update Services entry which caused the posting process to bog down. It appears the outbound ping trackback is behind Options>Writing>Update Services pings in the order of the execution and therefore the outbound trackback never was making it out (this is my theory). I’d urge WordPress to investigate this and see if it would be possible to reorder this so the outbound trackback was sent even if there was a dead ping entry in Options>Writing>Update Services. If you are having trouble sending an outbound trackback remove everything in the Options>Writing>Update Services try to see if that works. If it does, you have a bad entry in Options>Writing>Update Services needing removal.
My current WordPress wishlist:
1. Test your code fully before releasing a new version please. There was a significant glitch with Feedburner.
2. Start to incorporate major plugins (Feedburner, Podpress, Trackback Validator, Viper’s Video Quicktags, etc) into the core software functionality. If Feedburner and other major plugins were incorporated into testing, the problem above would not have occurred.
3. In my last wishlist in August, I posted the following: “I’d like all of the funtionality of being hosted on wordpress.org – when I signed up I did not know of these differences and quite frankly it’s a disappointment as I want my own domain. I hope you seriously listen to this. To get corporate users to adopt WordPress this would pretty much be mandatory!” My wish has not come true yet.
4. Make eliminating Askimet “False Positives” a top priority. It has the potential to create serious problems in the blogosphere.
5. Create a solution for the Options>Writing>Update Services issue so that no WordPress user ever has to deal with the issue I dealt with.
6. Release 2.0.7 and announce what steps you will take to prevent a version with a bug being released again. please show us your innovative learning culture is focused on the customer experience.
7. I hope that WordPress chooses to actively listen and acknowledge known concerns and post future wishlists transparently on their blog in the future for community feedback.
Thank you for listening, I welcome additions and expansion of this list and the creation of happy bloggers everywhere!
UPDATE: Item 8 – Have embedded video work with WSYWIG editor without conflict!