Links and stuff from last week.
I have some interesting sites to share with you from last week. I call this a random link-o-rama, or share-content-fest.
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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, this is just an interview. 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.
I also 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 revenue. That's crazy. I wonder how many of his investments have failed? I wish I had the money to do "quick" investments of a quarter million dollars!
As it relates to Google:
The Google adwords blog announced their bid ideas program, these are being rolled out in stages. Last week Google acquired Aadvark which by the way I'm already using, and loving it. This week, they bought reMail
On WordPress:
Matt Mullenweg 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 in regards to SEO plugins for WordPress, I was familiar with a lot of them, but I'm glad to see a couple 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.
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 which is a mechanism that detects gunfire.
TV Everywhere. HBO will now have content available on the web, first to FiOS subscribers (Verizon). But this is one of the first premiere networks to offer their content online, expect many more to follow suit soon. I noticed some of the larger 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.
About this site:
I got a couple changes done around here finally. WP-Super Cache was broken for some reason, fixed that. I also installed and activated a do-follow plugin so now commenters get a do-follow link back after they leave comments around the site, they need to leave a few though before it turns on. So comment on! And lastly, I discovered that my feed is broken. I need to fix that so people can actually subscribe to the site if they'd like, that seems to be broken at the moment. Peace out for now.
Yup I'm on Twitter and you can follow me. @notagrouch and I'm also on a million other networks, lately I've been on Google Buzz quite a bit. Follow me there if you'd like as well
