Posted: 06 Jan 2010 01:30 AM PST

I saw a missing cat poster at my local grocery store. Upon looking at it for a while, I thought about tweeting a picture of the missing animal. And then I realized just how useless that would be. 100,000 people would get the tweet and think, “I don’t live anywhere near you,” and that’d be the end of that data.

This got me thinking: if I could “pocket” my data, restrict certain tweets to certain geographies on the OUTBOUND side of Twitter, then that’d be neat. I mean, most smartphone apps of Twitter have my location. What if they could say to the API, “Only send this to people within 25 miles of this location?”

Then, at CES, I could opt for “geopocketed” tweets, so that you don’t get bored to death about hearing where I am, who I’m meeting up with, etc, but then I can tweet to the “unlocal” people the “news” that I find. See where I’m going?

What if we had a way to geo-restrict our OUTGOING tweets for certain uses?

Photo credit heiwa4126

What Should I See at CES 2010 and Why

Posted: 05 Jan 2010 12:10 PM PST

I’ll be at CES 2010. What should I check out? Who should I visit? Why?

Depends How You Define Value

Posted: 05 Jan 2010 08:50 AM PST

Seth Godin says Anil Dash has discovered bullhorns are overrated. I agree that bullhorns, as a shouting tool, are not very useful. I disagree that having a larger twitter following is not useful. It depends what you do with them.

I have a hundred thousand followers on Twitter. I follow back about 93,000. I don’t see most of what you tweet about. I use search and lists to keep up with what I can, but the software API can’t even serve all your tweets to me.

But there’s value in that number. I get value in the following ways:

You find the good stuff for me, so I can learn more.
You promote social causes that I support if they resonate with you.
You visit the great voices I share with you, growing their audience and potential for relationship.
You help spread important news like Amber alerts fast.
You support the better of my posts. (Heck, sometimes you support my posts that I don’t even like.)
You keep me in the loop and talk with me when we both have a moment.

I get tons of value from Twitter every day. Heck, just today, I mentioned on Twitter that I’ve made the Roger Smith Hotel my exclusive hotel in NYC, and that spurred a new conversation with a hotel in Boston. I spoke to the folks at Legal Seafoods, after they noticed I recommended them to a friend visiting Boston. Now, they’re going out to buy my book, and so I offered to swing by and sign it and talk.

I get value every day from Twitter. It’s my serendipity engine. It’s my liner notes.

Where Seth is right, however, is that bullhorns are stupid and useless.

But no value in Twitter? Not on my watch.

How We Make Businesses These Days

Posted: 05 Jan 2010 07:39 AM PST

I’m starting a new business to address a different market segment. I’m also working on some new businesses with Stephen and Nick Saber of the CrossTech Group. Some time soon, there’ll be another venture started with Brian Clark and Darren Rowse and Sonia Simone and a few more, too. It seems that the last four years have been a lot of started businesses, all of them with specific targets and specific markets.

It’s different, how we do it these days. I’m thinking about it, as I have a group of friends and respected colleagues helping me work through ideas on a new project. How one starts and launches a business these days is a lot more fluid, more flexible, and more learn-as-you-go than it used to be.

When We Started New Marketing Labs

For instance, when I started New Marketing Labs, I had Stephen and Nick to help with the back-office stuff, but I had free reign to make something happen. I hired a couple of smart guys, and we just put up our shingle. We didn’t even have a website. We just started telling people we were in business. Soon, we had a client.

Our client was kind and helped us cut our teeth. What we learned, we invested into our next clients, so they’d suffer a bit less. We discovered what people wanted, what they didn’t want. We retooled our offerings accordingly. We experimented, we explored, we tested and tried things out in the live marketplace. And everyone benefited.

But we tried things, iterated, and made corrections and new rules as we went along. We had the pirate ship mentality of chasing gold (goals, in our case), and fleet maneuvers be damned.

How the Internet Changed Business Making

In my thinking, the Internet is to blame with how we make new businesses. It’s something to do with thinking about single-serving sites like Twitter, and/or the modular way that business can be conducted with a federation of loose connections instead of with a solid backbone. We also have all the infrastructure to move quickly, to shift, to do things in a distributed and collaborative fashion.

Think about it. I can set up Freshbooks to do my invoicing, build a quick WordPress site, use Google Docs for my planning tools, use PayPal to take money, and Twitter and Socialcast (or Google Wave) to do my team planning, can use Batchbook to keep my CRM, and so on.

There are dozens of iterations on the above. It’s all there to be used for our dreams.

But go a step back. We can find like minds easier. The moment I wrote that I’m thinking about the future of adult education, I had an inbox full of willing collaborators. If I told you I wanted to write a pop culture blog with video about men’s culture, a bunch of you would jump in, too. That’s the thing. We can issue a call to action easier, too.

Oh, and if you get stuck, you can find the people who know the answers easier. LinkedIn Answers and Twitter and Facebook are bursting at the seams with people who would love to help you.

Think. Sketch. Execute. Revise

To me, the new formula of business is this: think. sketch. execute. revise. It’s important to consider contingencies. It’s important to be prepared for what can go wrong. But the best way to find out what’s going to go wrong is to launch and find the flaws.

This is top of mind to me right now, as I’m about to launch a business in a marketplace that I don’t fully understand, with a product that I’m still developing, to a bunch of people who I don’t necessarily have neatly corralled. Am I afraid? Not at all. I’ve got smart collaborators. We’ll figure it out. Will we upset someone along the way? No question. Tell me one business that hasn’t made a mistake. The goal, I imagine, is not to make any fatal mistakes.

Think. Sketch. Execute. Revise.