The Behrens Venture

Still finishing up stuff from Thanksgiving break. I had wanted to create a uniform way to display some of my social networked applications, my own personal friend feed, but I hadn’t found the time. I had wanted to write my own application/script to manage things, but my friend over at Widgetbox sold me on trying out their “blidget.” You can take any RSS feed, turn it into a widget, and allow you to fancify it anyway you want. You also get free statistics on the widget! Very quick, easy, and painless. Stupid name, cool application.

I’ve included a blidget of my flickr stream below, but check out the Connect page, which has my google reader shared items and my twitters updates as well. These are the main important services that I use regularly.

Another 10 weeks spent at RIT and it’s beginning to snow. My grades are back already and I got 2 As, my first in a long time. The GPA could use them. Moving forward though, I have a big trip planned this Christmas to visit friends in Thailand and China. I have alot of planning left to do and I leave in less than a month. My classes for next quarter have been decided and I’m pretty read for them. For the immediate time, I have 2 weeks off from school and I am trying to made good use of that time.

With that all time, I’ve set a personal schedule for myself for the first week of break, to have a “project week” of sorts. Seven official days, from this previous Sunday to Saturday. I have an ad-hoc list that I’d like to share:

• Post a bunch of thoughts on my blog. Stuff has been building up, plenty of ideas this quarter, but no time to write. It’s taken years to get to this point, but I realize my goal of this blog is to share my ideas and opinions for others to take note of and possibly learn from. It’s harder than it sounds!
• Organize my files. Mainly computer files, but I’ve had some ideas for organizing that I’ve wanted to try.
• Update my resume! Always useful.
• Post some OpenGL code from my Computer Graphics class this quarter. See the sharing of ideas and knowledge. Even though I did terribly in the class, I enjoyed the exploratory part of the class, but I found out that CG involves lots of maths. I am quite terrible at math. Disappointing.
• Get some other personal coding done and make it public. This ties into the other stuff, setting up a public repository and cleaning up my code to be presentable. Also refactoring and trying new stuff in Python.
• READ! I bought about 20 books from Amazon this quarter that I have been flipping through. Now is the time to get a crack at them.

In the past 3 days, I’ve already taken a crack at the reading part, finishing about 6 books and staying up until 5am doing so. It fries my brain after a while, especially technical books, so you just have to switch topics pretty frequently. I’ve been sitting alone in my apartment for this, just focusing on learning and it’s been great so far. Hopefully this all pays off when I graduate!

As an avid RSS user, despite RSS usage still being reported as around 11% of “online adults,” I follow about 80 blogs according to Google Reader statistics. One of the main features that I enjoy with Reader is the ability to share posts with friends who are using Reader and also view their shared items, like another blog that you follow. Even with only a few friends using this feature, it has allowed me to view a much wider range of posts, as well as get a deeper look into my what my friends are reading, and to get a condensed version of what they read; generally only the good stuff. Also, with the ability to add notes to posts when you share them, you add a personal touch and can bring context to an individual post that might have trouble standing on its own.

So my main goal with all of this would be to harness the power of my friends to improve my knowledge base. I’ve been introduced to some good blogs and gotten my friends to start reading some new stuff that I feel would help them. The problem comes when blogs start to overlap and you start sharing the same posts that someone has already read. Fine-grain control would limit this, through sharing only with a specific friend or a group of friends, but placing those additional constraints on sharing might harm it more than help it, making a more difficult barrier of entry.

One solution would be to bring structure to the system, through grouping blogs into interests or viewing blog compatability with another friend; how many blogs that you and this person follow overlap. Venn-diagrams of tags or blogs seem like a good representation of the overlap. The idea in my mind is something like a stock trading group or book club. As an individual, you can persue and study an specific interest, but when you share your condensed knowledge with the group, everyone benefits. I read X, Y, Z blog, you read A, B, C blog, and we share your results, in effect getting the best of both blogs.  Bringing this kind of an organizational system to Google Reader would be awesome, maybe it already exists, but I will start searching. Blogs are informational sources are immensly powerful and bringing your friends together improves that power.

Today, I learned quite a great deal about business and would like to share. I went to RIT’s annual Entrepreneur Conference, a business, serial entrepreneur, and startup focused conference featuring many local and non-so local business minded folks. Starting bright and early at 8AM (ugh) and going until around 3-4PM, there were 3 main lecture blocks, with a keynote in the middle from Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText, a enterprise-focused software company in Silicon Valley. I attended a “Business 101” panel, then “Valuation of Early Risk Technology” lecture, and closed with a quite interesting “Starting a Video Game Company” talk, which made it quite a busy day and impressed me quite a deal with my college. I wish they would pull off events of this quality more frequently! Anyways, let me enlighten you on everything except the video game talk, which I will save for part 2 and its own separate article!

Business 101

Three main principles of entrepreneurship are:

• having a market or an opportunity
• resources; money, technology, or IP
• a good management team; people

With your idea and these items, use your passion to make things happen. You must remain very devoted to your idea and your team. You cannot handle everything, but you should be able to trust and delegate stuff to your team. Find a mentor and advisory board to review your situation with monthly.

One of the surprising ideas that was brought up was how the current US economic downtown was a good thing for business. People with cash are willing to invest it in new and different methods, along with being able to get talented people for cheap rates. You need a plan to get to market, but with angel investors and new communities today, it’s far easier to find someone willing to invest than previously.

Valuation of Early Risk Tech

To be honest, this talk was a bit out of my league. Featuring Ted Hagelin, a professor from Syracuse University, he went deep into the economics and logistics of measuring value. He had made complaints about the USPTO, stemming from the 6 years it took him to get a patent on his method of valuing tech. It was a foreign area for me, but I able to salvage a bit from his talk.

Keynote

The keynote talk was the highlight of my day, from Ross Mayfield, mentioned above. He gave a broad overview of web 2.0, the technologies it has presented to the public, and how his company uses them to generate value in companies. He had a very open way of talking, with the ability to split the divide between the know-it-all nerd and the unfamiliar person quite well. During my time out in Silicon Valley, I found a very sharp disparity between those who know every single VIP in the Valley and those outside the Valley who could care less. It’s very easy in Silicon Valley to get wrapped up in grand ideas and have your thoughts supported by those around you, when no one else cares… He also presented some very good stories from taking risks with his business, that others would shy away from. He mentioned finding a CEO through a blog post and LinkedIn, and publicly documenting the process. Being open and accepting help from customers to generate value seemed to be the main trend from web 2.0.

Overall, a very well done conference with lots to learn from and quite an impressive show from RIT. It was a bit more formal than a Barcamp, but still informal enough that you could ask questions during a presentation, a format which I really enjoy. Keep following me for Part 2, where I will discuss the video game industry, an industry that I’m quite passionate about!