Congratulations to Brian Lamb and his award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. No doubt that CSPAN is an acquired taste…and one that I have. I had the opportunity to see Brian speak at the University of Virginia’s festival of the book in 1997.
Mr. Lamb is on my list of people to spend some time with…and I thank him for what he has been able to build among the noise and chaos of cable television.
We traveled to St. Simons Island, GA last week to spend a few days with my parents and participate in the annual Georgia/Florida game. I say participate as we don’t actually go to the game in Jacksonville rather tailgate with the mass of UGA fans that descend on this small coastal town every year for the event.
Thankfully, Georgia actually won this year (sorry Gary) and we can continue to call this a rivalry after winning only three previous times in the past 15 years (dating back to my time as an undergrad). Lots of great time with my parents and seafood at local places like the Crab Trap.
I was having a discussion with my Dad about work and work challenges recently and he used this phrase as a way to extract emotion out of the latest fire or emergency. He spent many years turning things around and squeezing profits out of places few thought possible. Combined with this is to take any problem and "break it down to dollars" or something to that effect. Again, remove the emotion and approach the problem pragmatically. Great advice.
I am looking to expand my team a bit at Hubspan and am looking for great product marketing folks. Ideally, you would have a background in enterprise software, collaboration, supply/demand chains, and/or B2B. Position is located in Seattle and offers the opportunity to join a rapidly growing early-stage company. If you are interested or know someone who might be, send a resume to robertcpease at gmail dot com.
Marel and I had the opportunity to attend the Washington/Oregon football game this past Saturday. Going to see the Huskies play at home was something that had been on our list of things to do while living in Seattle and, thanks to our friend Steve, we were able to experience it.
A few of observations:
1. This rivalry is pretty intense comparing to ones I know well from the SEC like Georgia/Florida or Tennessee/Alabama – great passion among the fans on both sides.
2. Tailgating is pretty serious although the tent shelters are to keep the rain off, not the sun. I saw a few grilling set-ups that were pretty impressive.
3. You can get hot chocolate (whip cream optional) from the guys walking the stands vs. Coca-Cola. This is indicative of the goal of staying warm.
4. They serve Ivar’s clam chowder at the concession stand. More for staying warm.
5. The stadium is old school – bleachers in the end zone, running track around the field, and no concentration of big dollar skyboxes. Classic college football.
All in all, a great experience although the Huskies lost. Give Willingham a few more years and UW will be a contender.
No, this is not another post by someone ranting about a miserable travel experience with a major airline (although I have no shortage of those). This is about a trip I took last week to Irvine, CA and having two first time flyers sitting in front of me – a boy and a girl that I would guess were somewhere between 4 and 6.
If you fly a great deal, you begin to take for granted many of the things this pair was pointing out. Namely, how much you could see, how neat it was to be flying in the clouds, and as one pointed out, they were "higher than grandad’s house."
The airlines don’t make it easy to enjoy flying these days and sharing the joy of this pair made the whole experience so much better.
A bit of a "wind storm" tonight made for white caps and waves blowing over the 520 bridge today on my way home from downtown. These don’t get as much lip service as the rain out here, but apparently they are another fixture of this place. This was not as bad as last year when the power was out for days on end and we had 90 mph gusts – although my friend Rob may dispute that as he was landing at Seatac tonight. Looks like it has passed at this point.
This story was passed to me today and thought it post worthy. Basically the friendly folks at Verizon are putting it on us (yes, I am a customer) to tell them NOT to share our call information with others. This Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI) is marketing gold as they plan to share it with "affiliates, agents and parent companies (including Vodafone) and their subsidiaries." Targeted ads based on your calling patterns anyone?
Carriers like Verizon are in constant competition to "suck less" than the alternatives and I have found them to be the best of the worst out there. I’ll make my call and suggest you do the same.
Uncle. I have become overwhelmed with the sheer number of RSS feeds I have accumulated over the previous year. Much like many declare email bankruptcy, I am going to extend this a bit and declare RSS bankruptcy. I can’t keep up so I am scaling back. I began to realize that there were just a few that I actually looked forward to reading with the rest getting "mark all as read" treatment. Newspapers and periodicals? Gone. Robert Scoble and other nonsense peddlers? Gone. Here’s my list of must haves:
I have more than this set up in my reader, but these are the ones I look forward to that post pretty regularly.
How’s that for acronym soup? Software as a service (SaaS) is all about providing value on-demand without the need to deploy software on premise. Fundamental to this a multi-tenant architecture meaning you don’t have to have an instance of a software product for every customer you serve on-demand. That’s one of the things that makes Hubspan unique (yes, that is a plug) and sets us apart.
This is a good post from Mark Morley over at GXS on this topic as it relates to the automotive industry (his focus) but these data points can be applied across verticals.
Venture Vice 