Category — Technology

Are you a programmer with lots of creative entrepreneurial ideas but scared to leave the man? Well, check out Dan Grigsby’s talk from RubyFringe at InfoQ: Dan Grigsby on Programmer/Entrepreneurs and Creative Hacking and Marketing.

He talks about how tools today let you do more software development faster. He talks about how this enables trying out tons of things for free and seeing what sticks. He talks about marketing Tai Chi, breaking into the “walled garden” and other creative marketing hacks. Go check it out and get your ventures rolling!

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Be sure to check this awesome book he mentioned in the talk!

Eric Schlosser

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America’s black market is much larger than we realize, and it affects us all deeply, whether or not we smoke pot, rent a risque video, or pay our kids’ nannies in cash. In Reefer Madness the best-selling author of Fast Food Nation turns his exacting eye on the underbelly of the American marketplace and its far-reaching influence on our society. Exposing three American mainstays - pot, porn, and illegal immigrants - Eric Schlosser shows how the black market has burgeoned over the past several decades. He also draws compelling parallels between underground and overground: how tycoons and gangsters rise and fall, how new techonology shapes a market, how government intervention can reinvigorate black markets as well as mainstream ones, and how big business learns - and profits - from the underground. Reefer Madness is a powerful investigation that illuminates the shadow economy and the culture that casts that shadow.

View More about Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market

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David Heinemier Hannson of 37Signals and creator of the web framework Ruby on Rails, gave a great talk at Paul Graham’s Startup School this weekend. In the same way that he and his 37Signals comrades defy conventional wisdom on developing technology, he presents his unconventional ideas on business (at least unconventional compared to the VC-ish and We-Want-To-Get-Bought-Out-By-Google crowd that probably attended Startup School).

Some highlights:

• Comparing over-fearing terrorism to over-hoping to be the next billion+ dollar Facebook or MySpace
• Targeting the “Fortune 5,000,000″
• Charge REAL MONEY for your product/service! *GASP*
• You don’t have to be the best Italian restaurant, there’s room for LOTS of excellent ones in the world
• You don’t always have to have a super original or creative idea … Zappos.com created a great business selling shoes online for godsakes! They just do it great with extraordinary customer service.

Anyway, watch the video, it’s well worth your time (and check out the always interesting comments on this over at the Signal vs. Noise blog when you’re done):

John Battelle

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springq.com says: When Google launched at the very end of the 90’s, people thought they were crazy because the search problem was “already done”. Well we know how the story ended; this is a great account of how it happened.

How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek Bestseller
Finalist for the Goldman Sachs/FT Business Book of the Year Award

What does the world want? According to John Battelle, a company that answers that question in all its shades of meaning can unlock the most intractable riddles of business and arguably of human culture itself. And for the past few years, that’s exactly what Google has been doing.

But The Search offers much more than the inside story of Google’s triumph. It’s a big- picture book about the past, present, and future of search technology and the enormous impact it’s starting to have on marketing, media, pop culture, dating, job hunting, international law, civil liberties, and just about every other sphere of human interest.

BACKCOVER: The Search is a superb story, well written and feverishly researched. Whether you are a student, techie, business executive, budding visionary or just enjoy pop culture, this is a book not to be missed.
USA Today

John Battelle is Silicon Valley’s Bob Woodward. One of the founders of Wired magazine, he has hung around Google for so long that he has come to be as close as any outsider can to actually being an insider.The result is a highly readable account of Google’s astonishing rise.
The Economist

It’s a fascinating story, and Mr. Battelle tells it well.
The Wall Street Journal

A surprisingly gripping storyThe Search yields impressive results, pairing a reportorial eye for detail with an evangelical zeal to help readers understand the import of the search revolution.
Wired News

View More about The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

Bruce Judson

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springq.com says: I read this book right when it came out and it was great; I think that I am going to re-read it now as I am going to start a new venture. For some reason, I’ve never heard much buzz about this book, but I think that it deserves to be grouped with some more popular entrepreneurship books.

“There is an epidemic of unhappiness in the American workplace. A full 70 percent of workers in the United States report that they are disengaged from their jobs. When asked, “”Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?”" only 20 percent of nearly 2 million employees said yes. It is no wonder that 56 percent of all Americans dream of starting their own business. So why don’t they do so? Because starting one’s own business is seen as difficult, expensive, and risky.

In this extraordinary book, successful Go It Alone! entrepreneur Bruce Judson explains that the conventional wisdom about starting your own business is stunningly wrong. Using the leverage of technology — e-mail, the World Wide Web, and the remarkable array of off-the-shelf business services now available — it is dramatically easier to start your own business. Magnified by these new services, it is also possible to create, for the first time, a highly focused business.

Bruce Judson shows you the practical steps that will allow nearly any individual to create a business, often using job skills that seem to require an entire corporation for support. It is no longer necessary to spend time on the tasks that don’t add value. It is now possible to stay small but reap big profits. Go-it-alone businesses allow the individual the freedom to concentrate on their greatest skills. After reading this book, your motto will be “Do What You Do Best, Let Others Do the Rest.”

View More about Go It Alone!: The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own

Michele Moreno

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Guy Kawasaki, CEO of garage.com and former chief evangelist of Apple Computer, Inc., presents his manifesto for world-changing innovation, using his battle-tested lessons to help revolutionaries become visionaries.

* Create Like a God *

Turn conventional wisdom on its head-create revolutionary products and services by analyzing how to approach the problems at hand.

* Command Like a King *

Take charge and make tough, insightful, and strategic decisions-break down the barriers that prevent product adoption and avoid “death magnets” (the stupid mistakes just about everyone makes).

* Work Like a Slave *

Get ready for hard work, and lots of it. To go from revolutionary to visionary, you’ll need to eat like a bird-relentlessly absorbing knowledge about your industry, customers, and competition–and poop like an elephant–spreading the large amount of information and knowledge that you’ve gained.

Filled with insights from top innovators such as Amazon.com, Dell, Hallmark, and Gillette and rich with hands-on experience from the front lines of business, Rules for Revolutionaries will empower you–whether you’re an entrepreneur, engineer, inventor, manager, or small business owner–to turn your dreams into reality, your reality into products, and your products into customer magnets.

View More about Rules For Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services

Jessica Livingston

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“All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever.” —Steve Wozniak, Apple

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.

Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?

Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it’s done.

But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businessesdo—create value—more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.

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Gina Smith

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springq.com says: iWoz doesn’t have a ton of great business advice, but it is a great read and shows that you can be very successful on your own terms and have lots of fun doing it.

The mastermind behind Apple sheds his low profile and steps forward to tell his story for the first time.

Before cell phones that fit in the palm of your hand and slim laptops that fit snugly into briefcases, computers were like strange, alien vending machines. They had cryptic switches, punch cards and pages of encoded output. But in 1975, a young engineering wizard named Steve Wozniak had an idea: What if you combined computer circuitry with a regular typewriter keyboard and a video screen? The result was the first true personal computer, the Apple I, a widely affordable machine that anyone could understand and figure out how to use.

Wozniak’s life—before and after Apple—is a “home-brew” mix of brilliant discovery and adventure, as an engineer, a concert promoter, a fifth-grade teacher, a philanthropist, and an irrepressible prankster. From the invention of the first personal computer to the rise of Apple as an industry giant, iWoz presents a no-holds-barred, rollicking, firsthand account of the humanist inventor who ignited the computer revolution. 16 pages of illustrations.

View More about iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It