How to Change the World

A Comment on Comments

I've been using the JS-Kit widgets for comments and ratings for this blog, and I'm really happy with them. JS-Kit commenting provides very effective ways to fight and delete spam, and I love that people can create avatars for their comments. The star-rating that you see is also from the company.

JS-Kit is installed on 550,000 blogs and has already managed 75 million comments. It powers major sites like eVite, Sun Microsystems, InfoWorld, JetBlug, and Experian. If it can handle icanhascheezburger (click here to see it in action), it can probably handle anything!

The Power of Red

The Pope dons red Prada kicks, politicians break out red ties in election season and that darn Netflix package always seems to stand out in a crowd of manilla and ivory mail. Why red? Do humans have a penchant for the rainbow’s most fiery color?

This study released in 2005 discovered that red-clad athletes out-performed competitors donning blue uniforms and suggested that the win discrepancy occurred because of an innate association of red with dominance and assertiveness. New research goes further in exploring the power of red. Researchers at Germany’s University of Münster threw judged competitions like tae kwon do into the mix and found that referees awarded athletes in red an average of 13 percent more points than azure-wearing sportsmen. So, why exactly does red provide such a distinct advantage?

The German study attributed their findings to an unconscious bias, but did not conclude where the bias stems from--suggesting that the reason could be as simple as red being more eye-catching. Other studies suggest that our weakness for red comes from primates’ unique color vision that in the past allowed the first humans to forage the forest and successfully locate ripe fruit. Instinctive or not, red definitely boasts some serious power.

While red might not be the color choice for a business looking to soothe and relax customers, like say a meditation studio or spa, if a company hopes to grab a bit of attention and give off an assertive message, strong shades of red might do the trick. Redbox, Red Lobster, Red Hat, (Product) Red and countless other companies have created instantly recognizable logos, websites and packaging that all appeal to our predisposition for all things scarlet, cherry, ruby, and straight-up red.

---

You can read more cool studies like the ones cited by going here and here.

YCombinator: The Art of the Open House

YCombinator is a new kind of venture capital firm that focuses on $20,000 investments to help entrepreneurs go from "idea to company." It admits two "batches" of entrepreneurs per year for a three-month period. At the end of the term, there is an open house where the companies strut their stuff to investors. YCombinator has helped over 100 startups. These are my pictures from this event a week ago.

The big change that makes YCombinator successful is that it's cheaper to start many companies these days. Hence, the power has shifted from the venture capitalist to the entrepreneur. That's a good thing.

These are the co-founders of YCombinator: Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham. Jessica is the author of the great book, Founders at Work. Click here to read how much I liked the book.

One of the offices.

A wall of cool designs.

Geek heaven.

Part of the office is dedicated to the design of robots.

There's got to be a back story to this wall of unicycles, but I don't know it. Maybe entrepreneurs spin their wheels less at YCombinator?

By the way, I used a great service called Fixmyphotos for all these pictures. All I had to do was send them the pictures I wanted to use, and Fixmyphotos cropped and edited them. Normally, this process takes me two to three hours, so Fixmyphotos is a great timesaver for me. This is the "before" version of the unicycle wall as an example.

The audience watching the 8-minute pitches.

My favorite company of the day: Posterous. If TypePad is blogging, and Twitter is nano-blogging, then Posterous is mini-blogging. Or, blogging for the rest of us. You send an email to post@posterous.com with pictures, PDFs, video, etc, and voila! you have a blog.

Check out my Posterous blog here, and you'll see how I posted pictures from my phone as well as pictures, a PDF, and a video from my Air.

TicketStumbler: find, compare, and buy tickets.

Peopleandpages: Google groups competitor. (You can click through, but it's not launched yet.)

Anyvite: easiest way to invite people.

The Morin brothers: Dan and Jeff, co-founders of Anyvite.

Picwing: digital picture frame with Wifi compatibility.

Edward Kim, co-founder of Picwing, with his product.

Meetcast: web conferencing made easy.

CO2stats: making websites green.

Youlicit: human-powered search results. This is the first time that I've ever seen an entrepreneur position his company in the upper right corner.

JobAlchemist: fixing online recruiting.

Slinkset: social websites in seconds.

Frogmetrics: customer feedback at the point of sale.

This is the Frogmetrics team: Jeremy Mims, Dustin Curtis, and Scott Brown.

ididwork: work logs that show what you did.

Back of ididworks tshirt.

Popcuts: buy songs, share them, and make money.

backtype: the "Google of comments."

Polleverywhere: audience polling via SMS.

Right: venture capitalists are getting younger and more women are entering the field.

Tim Ferris putting in his four hours of work for the week. He sure has a big watch for someone that works so little.

Patrick Lor, co-founder of iStockphoto.

Paul Graham pitching in, as opposed to being pitched to, at the end of the day.

---

Here are more sources of information that may help you: Startups, entrepreneurship, and venture capital.

The Five Most Important Lessons of Entrepreneurship

Over at the Sun Microsystems blog I've posted my list of the five most important lessons I've learned as an entrepreneur. #1 is "Focus on cash flow." Please check out the entire posting here.

More information for startups is also available here and more information for small business is here.

The Art of iPhone Battery Life

Some of my buddies have expressed astonishment that I get approximately thirty-six hours of standby with my iPhone, so I'm sharing my settings. Note: this is my second 3G iPhone--I returned the first one because I was getting only five hours of standby time.

This is my usage screen. One thing to notice: I don't talk much on the phone--"talk is not cheap" in my book. I am totally an email/tweet centric person. This clearly contributes to my standby time. I consider my iPhone a "tinytop computer that can also send and receive phone calls" as opposed to a phone that can "do email and browse."

These are my top-level settings. Wi-Fi is turned off. Push is off, and Fetch New Data is set to hourly.

These are my General settings. Bluetooth and Location Services are off.

These are my Network settings. 3G is off for two reasons: to extend battery life and because calls drop in areas where 3G coverage is spotty--for example, Goleta, California.

These are my Mail, Contacts, Calendars settings. I only use MobileMe to synch bookmarks. Exchange does the heavy lifting of mail, contacts, and calendars. Incidentally, with much trepidation, I synched 9,000 contacts to my iPhone via Exchange. To my delight, I found that Google's mobile app can handle this many contacts quite well. Searching for contacts while in Phone or Camera is also tolerable.

In case you're wondering, these are the applications that I've added: Adventure, Bejeweled 2, Google, If Found, mDialog, PCalc, Showtimes, TicTacToe, Twittelator, Twitterific, and You're #1. The four that I have in the launch bar or whatever it's called on an iPhone are Mail, Phone, Twittelator, and Calendar.

I don't know if you'll get this kind of standby time (or more!), but this is what works for me. Of course, people with lesser phones are having a good chuckle because they get three to five days standby time, but their phones aren't cool. And it's better to have a cool phone that you have to charge everyday than a sucky phone that you can charge once a week.

For more news and information about iPhone, go to here.

Lenovo Olympic Bloggers

Check out this site where Lenovo is aggregating the blogs, tweets, pictures, and video of Olympic athletes from around the world. Lenovo provided these athletes with Ideapad laptops and video cameras and let them go at it.

How to Tell If Your Boss Is Crazy

Over at the American Express blog I explain how to tell if your boss is crazy based on the work of Mindsite to DSM-IV-TR bring to the rest of us. If you suspect that you work for a narcissistic, paranoid, obssessive-compulsive, anti-social nut case, click here to learn more. Related resources: "Is Your Boss an Asshole?" and Psychology.alltop.

BlogWorld Expo Special Discount

If you're going to BlogWorld Expo, you can get an additional 20% off even the early-bird prices (they expire on August 22nd) by using this special code: "Alltopvip." This conference is in Las Vegas on September 19-21. Click here to register.

Everyday Uses of Psychology

I found a great article called "10 Practical Uses for Psychological Research in Everyday Life." It explains how to detect lies, make your smile more attractive, persuade people, avoid getting scammed, and reduce your cholesterol level. On example: one person expressing an opinion three times has 90% of the effectiveness as three people expressing it once. I love stuff like this.

How to Frame a Brain

Is your mantra, mission, and/or elevator pitch failing? Startups often have the problem that nobody can understand them. If this is you, George Lakoff may be your fix. Lakoff is a cognitive linguist who focuses on "the last smile" between message and recognition in brain. The Chronicle has a brief history of Lakoff's career (thanks to Mindhacks.com for the link) that is must reading for founders trying to change the world...but who can't understand why the world won't listen.

Lakoff's main focus for the past decade has been to pin down how the Republican Party has so consistently out maneuvered the Democratic Party...verbally. In translating linguistics into plain English politicians can understand, Lakoff has laid a banquet before startups with new-to-the-world technologies. If your customers don't have the mental receptors in order to receive your message, what do you do? Lakoff tells you in Don't Think of an Elephant and his other works explained in this article.

The bottom line of Lakoff is that you have to focus on two things: frames and arguments. Frames are examples, stories, and analytical models that allow problems to be set up for an argument. And the argument is what you do with all the objects in your frame. Finding frames is a process of pure brain pain. You search, find, try, refine, and repeat in a brute force exercise to find ways for your audience to understand you. In Don't Think of an Elephant Lakoff describes the funded think tanks that republicans use to generate a steady stream of white papers trying out ways of communicating that will trick Americans into voting regardless of their self interest.

Arguing too, is pain for the brain. Arguments happen, then they get simplified, then they grow in layers, then they consolidate like glaciers to an essence. You don't make just one trip to the venture capitalist and walk away with money. You wear them down. To do this best, you need to invest heavily and brain painfully to make people understand your product and what it does for your customers. And you need to sharpen your argument over time. Lakoff might say that venture capitalists are more likely to invest in improvements to your pitch, than in your first product.

By Bill Meade.