Bits and pieces.

I have some interesting sites to share with you, call this a random link-o-rama.

Random interesting stuff:

Read a great article on management and whether it is good or reasonable or even advisable to expect your employees to put in 60 hour workweeks, just because you (as the owner) do . The article asks: Ask yourself what actually matters in the long run. Is it that a certain butt is in a certain chair at a certain hour or would you prefer version 1.0 gets released on time? Would you rather an employee punches a card or he writes code with minimal bugs? Do you want someone who has no life or someone who brings fresh ideas to the office? - My vote? focus on productivity, it is already been researched and suggested that we're only productive for a few hours a day anyway despite the forceful 8 hour days. From the same publishing powerhouse, VentureBeat, I read about Aaron Patzer. Aaron cashed out by selling his awesome application last year for 170 million. Aaron founded Mint.com which is a great finances tracking application online, Mint.com was acquired by Intuit, makers of Turbotax and other finance products last year.

In a rather interesting field that I'm just starting to read more about, Venture Capital, I learned about Charles River Ventures, a firm that started a VC program called Quickstart. Out of 22 "quick" quarter million dollar investments, 6 of the companies invested in have made over $37 million in revenu.

As it relates to Google:

The Google adwords blog announced their "bid ideas" (http://adwordsagency.blogspot.com/2010/02/find-big-ideas-with-bid-ideas.html) program, these are being rolled out in stages. Last week Google acquired Aadvar, this week, they bought reMail (http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2010/02/remail-acquired-by-google.html).

On WordPress:

Matt explains a little more about the WordPress.com outage that affected millions of people. Quick to respond and react, this is why I love WordPress. I discovered a great post for 2010 in regards to SEO plugins for WordPress, I was familiar with a lot of them, but I'm glad to see a few new ones listed and will be testing them out soon. Amongst the new ones for me are: WP to Twitter and I Love Social Bookmarking.

I learned about Sales Page theme for WordPress; simplifies how to make an affiliate sales page. There's a demo on how to use it, the meat and potatoes of the demo start around minute 1:00, the beginning is just selling you into the product. Please note that this is a paid product, I'm not affiliated with it, nor have I actually used it. It just looks good, (it allows you to create pages like the one where the video is being shown) seems great for marketers.

Other interests:

Wireless Power, real life application and working device- I read about PowerKiss, a wireless power supply for cell phones. Seems promising, and oh so awesome. )
Engineering week at UCI It is engineering week at UCI, and I think this egg dropping contest is part of it. I enjoyed watching some of the pictures about this event. Dropping an egg from a 9 story height to see if you can protect it enough to survive the fall.
SlideRocket promises ) to boost your presentations by adding plugins and widgets that incorporate real-time data to your presentations, feeds like twitter, polls etcetera may be added to your presentations to avoid "stale" time.
While reading more VentureBeat, I found that there's a thing called ShotSpotter (http://www.shotspotter.com/) which is a gunfire detection system.

TV Everywhere. HBO will now have content available on the web, first to FiOS subscribers (Verizon). () But this is one of the first permiere networks to offer their content online, expect many more to follow suit soon. I noticed some of the larger "standard" or public broadcast networks already offer their content online, most of them do it for free. HBO today, the rest will follow and eventually you'll be able to watch any show online.

This was supposed to post back in February but something seems to have failed with my auto-scheduling system. Sorry for the staleness in some of the links, but the info is still good and I wanted to put it out there for you.