Tag Archives: business

Business, Entertainment

Top Entrepreneurial Films – Fan Favorites

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For my birthday, I took a look at the movies that have influenced my business decisions over the years. Here are my top entrepreneurial films for all the underdogs who could use a good, helping push up the mountain. 

Moneyball (2011) – IMDb

Classic David and Goliath story told by phenomenal actors such as Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill. How can a small-budget baseball team compete with the large pockets of other behemoths? Reinvent the way teams are formulated, i.e., reinvent the game… to some extent. It’s amazing to watch the actors/people react to a new process, a major disruptive process after doing things they’ve always done. These characters realize the upheaval of a new process changes the way they do business they react in somewhat surprising ways. “Adapt or Die” as the character played by Brad Pitt says.

The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) – IMDb

“You know, for kids. ” Brilliant performances by several well-known actors such as Paul Newman pull off a great script/story into a memorable production. Tim Robbins’s character, an “off the boat”, or shall I say bus, a recent college graduate, has a grand design and is happy to work his way up. So gullible, Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) is caught up in a scheme to have the company’s stock tank, so the board could snatch the company’s stock up for profit. To the board’s dismay, Norville does have a grandiose idea that takes the company in a profitable direction. Great to see the rise and fall of this once optimistic “new kid on the block”.

Other People’s Money (1991) – IMDb

An amazing cast, including the talented Danny Devito, with the help of a fantastic script, developed a phenomenal production. There are many lessons to be learned from this film, but I don’t want to give you any spoilers. When all hope seems lost, there is a plot twist that can only be categorized with the classic quote by Winston Churchill, “The definition of Success is moving from Failure to Failure without Loss of Enthusiasm.”

Erin Brockovich (2000) – IMDb

A woman driven by survival, a single mother, just trying to get by, manages to cling to happenstance, and ride that potential opportunity for all its worth. The system bucking Erin like a wild bull, which she manages, through the pursuit of a passion for people even more dire than her own situation, fights for her “extended family”, and one would argue, fighting for justice for those who could not.

Jerry Maguire (1996) – IMDb

Jerry transcends from Sell, Sell, Sell backed by a recognizable, affinity brand to a budding entrepreneur trying to build a relationship with his client and “keep the lights on”. Anyone think Tom Cruise got this gig because of his work on Rain Man selling Ferrari?

Joy (2015) – IMDb

A single mom within a challenging environment steps up the ladder and claws her way into a successful entrepreneur. One can only marvel at her success and note each step; each challenge was met by bold, creative solutions.

The Devil Wears Prada (2006) – IMDb

The transformation from the academic to the business world was amazing. Climbing the ladder of success or falling into the pit of despair. It’s all perspective.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) – IMDb

What a whimsical fantasy that delights and turns my stomach at the same time. I just want to know if the momma dollar and poppa dollar had a family after the run on the banks and the savings and loan?

Business, Economy, Entertainment, Finance, Media, Technology

Social Media: News Feed verse App InMail

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Better Demographic Penetration and Transparency to More Accurately Determine Creative Media Asset Worth

News Media Assets

News Media Assets are created by writers of non-fictional work, coverage of various topics targeted towards the periodical demographic.

Selling Advertising Space

Layered within the news media product, consists of News Media Assets and sold advertisement space. Ad positioning throughout the news media product may have commonality between the product or service being advertised and the news media asset. A goal is the smooth transition between reader of asset and advertisement.

Revenue Models For News Media Assets

  • Deriving revenue from sponsors of news Media Assets
  • Subscription Base of News Media Assets, regular frequency of news media product to subscriber base.

Social Media – News Feeds

The news agencies post to public news feeds a “teaser” headline, a sentence or two describing the news media asset, and a teaser image all to lure prospective readers to clink a link to the news media publisher’s platform. At that point, the publisher sets the “ground rules” for the potential subscriber, e.g. 10 free articles a month, then their digital subscription price of NN goes into effect.

Social Media – InMail (I.e. eMail within the platform)

InMail through the social media platform can come from a variety of sources, for example:

  • Former colleague looking to reconnect
  • Recruiter looking to pitch a potential role
  • Sales / Marketing InMail targeting you as a potential customer of their product or service
The Tools to get the Job Done

As a prior client of LinkedIn Advertising for both ad placement and Sponsored InMail, I found the tools provided and the granularity upon which to refine the demographics impressive, and not lacking in any way.

Personable, Targeted Marketing of News Media Assets, sponsored by 3rd party promoting their product or service.

Delivering News Media Assets to your digital door step, with advertising partners speckled into the asset. Because of the granularity of the InMail advertising controls demographics are at a level of precision. Beyond what a magazine or newspaper, digital or print, can offer.

it’s all about the targeted audience and the granularity of the data collected and then leveraged to meet the desired audience. Much more personal than a link back to the publisher’s platform.

Just like there are expenses to do business in print or traditional digital, the price of doing business with a platform like LinkedIn Sponsored InMail, would be absorbed by the news media agency, net advertisement placement for advertisements.

Although the LinkedIN Social platform was used for reference, other platforms may be leveraged, depending upon the product or services being marketed, such as a Facebook People Magazine article relevant to their demographic, partnership / sponsorship.

Fake News – Not a Problem

Since News Media Agencies will now pair with “sponsors” or commonly know as advertisers, both parties, the news agency and the sponsor have “skin in the game”, it is less likely to be a factitious article.

Agile, Business, Development, Help, Motivation, Personal, SDLC, Software Development, Technology, Work

7 Failures I Needed to Succeed

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Here is a list of seven failures from my professional career, how I met those challenges, and in some cases, turned them into opportunities

Underestimate

Eager to please throughout my career, I was burned many times, and in some cases continue to be burned by underestimating the effort required for an activity, or task, which roll up to the delivery of features, or meeting a milestone. In my earlier years, I “shot from the hip” to senior management, and they held me to those commitments. Over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to document and mitigate risks. In addition I learned additional tools, both process and communication / people skills:

* “Interesting point, let me consider, and get back to you.” You don’t have to provide an answer right away. Consider the scope and impact of the questions you are presented. Unless you are almost certain of the answer, try to defer.

* Planning Poker (Agile) collaborative (blind) estimates make better estimations. Through collaboration, you reach joint commitment. You eliminate the “boss knows best” factor.

Hearing but not Listening

Throughout my personal and professional life, I’ve struggled with this aspect of communication, more so earlier on in my life. Two people have a meeting, and discuss their point of views regarding the same topic. They both leave the room, and have two polar opposite prospectives of what was communicated.

Even in the same language, things get “lost in the translation.“. There are many process tools to better your communications style. You hear what you want to hear. You don’t probe deep enough into another person’s perspective.

Overestimate

Adding too much margin into an estimate, being conservative in your effort estimate at times may not be the best course of action. “Right Sizing” the estimate is typically the desired approach unless otherwise guided by the appropriate stakeholders. There are lots of tools for Effort estimation, poker planning, and fist of five are just two examples.

Army of One – Embrace Opportunity

I was brought into a development team as a Software Quality Assurance manager for a well known Financial Services organization. I was to build a team of QA staff as well as mature their process workflow, e.g. implement software change management.

The department’s QA resources per team dwindled, letting go these resources, and not growing the teams as first advertised during the interviews. I found myself constantly working with the team putting out fires. Best case scenario, I worked “after” hours just to work on the strategic stuff like process improvements, and automation. I stuck to the opportunity to learn as much as possible. Sticking with the job, I built my knowledge and relationships that would wind up propelling my career to later on build and manage a 50 person, global team.

Build it and they will Come…Bull!

I chose to try my own startup at some point in my professional career. I had worked for a startup firm out of college, but that was not the same as my own self startup. There were lots of balls to juggle, decisions to make and prioritize. After a year and a half, I shutdown the company, more money going out than in, and I was also “relatively” self funded.

One of the several ill choices I made was “Build it and They will Come.” At the time it was 2009, and the mobile frenzy was just starting to heat up. Feb 2009, Apple was at 30 USD per share! 30! I built a client/server mobile application for expertise transactions, way ahead of my time. I was almost entirely focused on the development of the solution, I clearly lost sight of the focused requirement of building market share. I did post Press Releases, but I didn’t embrace digital marketing as a core spend and activity for my business.

Needless to say I was “The Best Kept Secret”.

Chasing the Sun

As a software product, startup firm, you need to segment your product to align to a target audience. However, honing in on the target market maybe problematic if the “fish aren’t biting”.

You find yourself reassessing the strategic and tactical goals of your product, pivoting often to eventually find your “pay dirt”. There may be fundamental influences to your ecosystem, such as a shift in a 3rd party product previously seen as complementary now seen as “overlapping”. Sales pitch and marketing approach may need to change along with your product.

Although pivoting often may be the name of the game, you still should recognize the cost in adapting to change. Process flows like being “agile” and Scrum help to smooth the pivot, as these processes revolve around constant development iterations and reflections every few weeks.

Time to Pull the Parachute Cord

I still have trouble with knowing when it’s time to say when. I enjoy troubleshooting problems, business, people, process, and technical. So, how long do you work on problem before you pull the ripcord?

Business, Development, Mobility, Podcast, Technology

Slack & Flickr Founder Stewart Butterfield Interviews with NPR

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Excellent, Well Told “Rags to Riches” Interview with the Founder of Slack, Stewart Butterfield

In the early 2000s, Stewart Butterfield tried to build a weird, massively multiplayer online game, but the venture failed.

Instead, he and his co-founders used the technology they had developed to create the photo-sharing site Flickr.

After Flickr was acquired by Yahoo in 2005, Butterfield went back to the online game idea, only to fail again.

But the office messaging platform Slack rose from the ashes of that second failure — a company which, today, is valued at over $5 billion.

Click through to the Audio Recording of the Interview.

Source: Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield : NPR

Business, Development, Economy, Technology

Human Evolution: Technology Continues to Transform Socieities for Generations

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In the last 20 years, I’ve observed technology trends, and Tech achievements have risen and fallen from the mainstream.  Tech has augmented our lives, and enhanced our human capabilities.  Our evolution will continue to be molded by technology and shape humanity for years to come.

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Everything you might find on your computer from emails to video are digital assets.  Content from providers, team collaboration,  push and/or pull asset distribution, and archiving content are the workflows of DAM.

DAM solutions are rapidly going main stream as small to medium sized content providers look to take control of their content from ingestion to distribution.  Shared digital assets will continue to grow rapidly.  Pressure by stockholders to maximize use of digital assets to grow revenue will fuel initiatives to  globally share and maintain digital asset taxonomies.  For example, object recognition applied to image, sound and video assets will dynamically add tags to assets in an effort to index ever growing content.  If standard taxonomies are not globally adopted, and continually applied to assets, digital content stored will become, in essence, unusable.

The Internet of Things (IoT)

All devices across all business verticals will become ‘Smart’ devices with bidirectional data flow.  Outbound ‘Smart’ device data flow is funneled into repositories for analysis to produce dashboards, reporting, and rules suggestions.

Inbound ‘Smart’ device data can trigger actions on the device. Several devices may work in concert defined by ‘grouping’ e.g. Home: Environmental. Remote programming updates may be triggered by the analysis of data.

  • AI Rules Engine runs on ‘backend’.  Rules defined by Induction,  through data analysis, and human set parameters,  executed in sequence
  • Device optimization updates, presets on devices may be tuned based on ‘transaction’ history, feedback from user, and other ‘Smart’ devices.
  • Grouped ‘Smart’ devices, e.g. health monitors’ data uploaded, analyzed, and correlating across group.  Updated rules, and notifications triggered.
  • Manual user commands, ad hoc or scheduled

… as a Service

Cloud ‘Services’ enables scalability on demand, relatively lower cost [CapEx] overhead, offsite redundancy, etc.  Provides software solutions companies to rapidly deploy to Dev., Test, and Prod. environments.  Gaming, storage, and virtual machines are just a few of the ‘…as a service’ offerings.  IoT analysis may reveal a new need for another service.

Human Interface

  • Augmented Reality A.R.

Integrates user to surrounding environment with overlay images to your eyes to REpresent anything, e.g. Identifies surrounding people with Twitter handle/user name above their heads.  Interacts with smartphone for Inbound and outbound data flow.  May allow App and OS programmers to enable users to interact with their ‘traditional’ software in new ways, e,g. Microsoft Windows 8+, current interaction with ’tiles’, may shift from a two to three dimensional manipulation and view of the tiles.  Tiles (apps) pop up when, through object recognition, predefined characteristics match, e.g.  Looking at a bank check sent to you from the mail?  Your Bank of America tile / app may ask if you want to deposit the check right now?

  • Virtual Reality, V.R.

As more drones, for example, collect video footage, may be used for people to experience the landscapes, beaches, cities, mountains, and other features of a potential destination, which may lead to tourism.  In fact, travel agencies may purchase the V.R. Headsets, and subscribe to a library of V.R. content.  Repository platform would need to be created.  Specs for the ‘How To’ on collecting V.R. Video footage should be accessible.  Hathaway real estate offers a V.R. tour of the house, from their office.

Autonomous  Vehicles (Average Consumer or hobbyist)

  • Cars 
  • Drones
  • Satellites 

Social Media Evolution

Driving forces to integrate with society puts pressure on individuals to integrate with the collective social conscious.  As digital assets are published, people will lunge at the opportunity to self tag every digital asset both self and community shared assets.  Tagging on social media platforms is already going ahead.   Taxonomies are built, maintained and shared across social media platforms.  Systematically tagged [inanimate] objects occur using object recognition. Shared, and maintained global taxonomies not only store data on people and their associated meta data, (e,g,  shoe size, education level completed, HS photo,etc.) but also store meta data about groups of people, relationships and their tagged object data.

The taxonomies are analyzed and correlated, providing better, more concise demographic profiles.  These profiles can be used for 

  • Clinical trials data collection
  • Fast identification of potential outbreaks, used by the CDC
  • The creation and management of AI produced Hedge Funds
  • Solicitation of goods and services

Out of Compliance

These three dreaded words you are guaranteed to see more and more often.  As all aspects of our lives become meta data on a taxonomy tree, the analysis of information will make correlations which drive consumers and members of society ‘out of compliance’.  For example, pointers to your shared videos of you skydiving will get added to your personal taxonomy tree.  Your taxonomy tree will be available and mandatory to get life insurance from a tier 1 company.  Upon daily inspection of your tree by an insurance AI engine, a hazardous event was flagged. Notifications from your life insurance company reminding you ‘dangerous’ activities are not covered on your policy.  Two infractions may drive up your premiums.

Business, Technology

LinkedIn Expansion: Live Video Chat for Screening \ Interview Process

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A natural progression of the LinkedIn platform enables companies to screen / interview candidates using live, video chat sessions available within the expanded LinkedIn platform.  Companies may be able to more accurately filter candidates with this screening process.   Live video chat / interview sessions with the candidate  and the employer may be recorded, and linked as an ‘artifact’ of the posted role.

For each video chat session, the employer may ‘bookmark’, in real time, their HR question, and ‘bookmark’ the candidate’s answer.   Video interviews may be automatically parsed for the bookmarked Q&A, and record the conversation to text.

HR may perform the initial interview screening, and then forward on the video session, and transcribed Q&A text to the hiring manager.   The hiring manager may toggle through each Q&A, read and/or play the interview of that section.  Based on the review of the candidate Q&A, the hiring manager may select to move forward with the candidate to next steps (e.g. face to face), or reject the candidate.

The live, video chat interview session may be indexed for key words, and if both the prospective employer and the candidate allow, the indexed text may be searchable by other prospective employers or recruiters.  The conversation’s full transcript, and/or the Q&A text are also available for search and review.  Optionally, if the candidate has been rejected, they may choose to share their interview Q&A session with other potential candidates.  This may be an issue for the employer, so both the candidate and employer must agree to have this available to either your connections or the public.

Business, Technology

Advertising Publisher Networks Make a Splash

Advertising Publisher Networks, A.P.N.s, are able to dynamically produce a splash page by ‘My Advertisers’ e.g. for your blog, so in addition to in-line advertising, a sponsors’ page may be dynamically produced, and all your advertisers may have their logo put in the splash page. In addition, the logo may be sized on the page relative to the CPC payout.  Each logo icon will have links to the companies or products being advertised.

Business, Technology

Google Cloud Print: Charge for Your 3D Printer Use at Any Storefront

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Google – Cloud Print. I know it’s just in beta at this moment, but I know these guys.  I also wrote a previous article about 3D printers in the Cloud not that long ago.  Coincidence?

The business model: connect your 3D printer(s) to Google’s Cloud Print, and allow people to print to your small storefront, stationary, or office supplies stores, as if they were printing two dimensional paper copies.

I wrote about the consumer taking their three dimensional models, and they have a wide range of ‘turnaround’ profit applications, as listed in my previous post.