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Posts under ‘entrepreneurship’

Kill the takeover

When I was at Yahoo! one of the things that drove me batty was seeing an advertiser take over a property, either the homepage or some other vertical (like Sports or Movies or some other bit of Yahoo). It’s not that I’m not for capitalism and it’s not that I don’t appreciate the attempt [...]

Leaving Yahoo!

I’ve always believed in the idea that you should leave a place in better shape than you found it. From when I go to a fast food restaurant and make sure I give the table a good wipe before I take off to my professional career. So with tomorrow – my last day [...]

Find your next employee using social media

I’m so tired of media recruiters emailing me about web design jobs.
I’m sure they all have the same CVs from 2001-2003 where PHP, MySQL, HTML, XHTML, CSS were sprinkled across the document. Things change, I’ve changed A LOT over the past 7 years, but yet people are still reaching out for me [...]

Company character

Stick with me this post might be a bit longer than usual.
I’ve been hearing lot’s of people talk about how companies can be good or evil. A lot of this goes back to Google’s whole “Don’t be evil” line that was the unofficial motto around the company a while back. Part of it [...]

Promoted tweets – the tip of the social media iceburg

So Twitter’s announced their monetisation model, “promoted tweets” will be seen from search queries around brands. To a lot of journos this looks a lot like ad sense / search engine monetisation that the likes of Overture / Google introduced years ago. But there’s more to this with Twitter.
People forget that social [...]

Bebo, lessons from the edge of the deadpool

So news came out recently that Aol was looking at either shutting down or selling of Bebo, the UK based social network that they bought a couple of years ago for about $850 Million for. I used bebo for about a day, but nevertheless I’m quite sad about how this is turning out.
Aol and [...]

My presentation on social media

I finally gave a presentation I can share with the world. The last couple of years have been filled with presenting asking for investment or presenting internal Yahoo! analytical gobbly goop, so it was nice to present on something that’s just a personal interest of mine.
I gave a talk on using social media at [...]

Building for value and profit

There’s an interesting discussion off of Jason Calacanis’s latest This Week in Start Ups with David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) of 37signals about running a company and scaling. In a nutshell, Jason’s point is that there is finance available and companies should try and raise money to “swing for the fences”. DHH say’s that’s [...]

The good type of failure

“Shoot for the moon, even if you miss it you’ll land amongst the stars”
I have to admit when I first heard of the Canadian Olympic Foundation’s goal of “Owning the Podium” at the 2010 Olympics I was a bit taken back, it just didn’t seem very “Canadian” to me. And even though I [...]

The FriendDA or I promise not to be a moron

After writing my last post, I circulated it to a mailing list and had a bunch of nice responses. There was some interesting conversation and some interesting ideas, which is always a good thing. One interesting email came from a business school classmate of mine who’s working on an interesting concept to disrupt [...]