Ryan A Graves.com

Seth Godin, author of many great business books, most recently The Dip, wrote a ‘how-to’ that I found interesting and useful on his blog. His premise is that a business book is not like a cook book. It’s not just a recipe, its a recipe for 2 or 3 pages but the rest of the book is the convincing or motivating that needs to occur in order for the reader to act on the recipe. If you are looking at a business book as a how-to, you’re wasting your money. Here is Seth’s recommendations on…

How to read a business book:

1. Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you’re reading, find the three things and do it. The goal of the reading, then, isn’t to persuade you to change, it’s to help you choose what to change.

2. If you’re going to invest a valuable asset (like time), go ahead and make it productive. Use a post-it or two, or some index cards or a highlighter. Not to write down stuff so you can forget it later, but to create marching orders. It’s simple: if three weeks go by and you haven’t taken action on what you’ve written down, you wasted your time.

3. It’s not about you, it’s about the next person. The single best use of a business book is to help someone else. Sharing what you read, handing the book to a person who needs it… pushing those around you to get in sync and to take action–that’s the main reason it’s a book, not a video or a seminar. A book is a souvenir and a container and a motivator and an easily leveraged tool. Hoarding books makes them worth less, not more.

Must watch videos of Y-Combinators start-up school.

http://omnisio.com/startupschool08 

David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 08

My take: This guy is a riot and he makes a great great point. Where are the good Italian food placeson the web?

Mike Arrington at Startup School 08

My take: Really, you’re going to have technical difficulties at an event like this? Get your cake up Mike.

Paul Graham at Startup School 08

My take: This man is one of the clearest thinkers in the web start-up space. He gets it. He’s not the best speaker in the world but he is a phenomenal writer and everyone needs to listen to this man.

Paul Buchheit at Startup School 08

My take: Again these guys are hear because they are good entrepreneurs not because they are good speakers. Well worth the watch.

Greg McAdoo, Partner at Sequoia Capital, talks at Startup School 08

My take: He is a partner at Sequoia. You better listen. Also, he really knows how to listen to entrepreneurs. He was the first speaker to do a Q&A (I think).

Marc Andreessen at Startup School 08

My take: Maybe one of the most experiences speakers. Lived through the bubble and the burst and still stand as a successfull entrepreneurs in the web space.

Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.com

My take: The guy started selling books online and now stores millions of companies data. There are plenty of companies that simply wouldn’t exist without Amazons data storage models. Brilliant.

Sam Altman at Startup School 08

Jack Sheridan

David Lawee at Startup School 08

Peter Norvig at Startup School 08

This is a project is a collaboration between the Interactive Media Division and the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. This video is yet another example of an awesome application of a mash-up of technologies. It will be fun to see the final product.

“Viewfinder” is a novel method for users to spatially situate, or “find the pose,” of their photographs, and then to view these photographs, along with others, as perfectly aligned overlays in a 3D world model such as Google Earth. Our objective is to provide a straightforward procedure for geo-locating photos of any kind, and our approach is to engage a community of users for a certain amount of human help. We specify that a 10-year-old should be able to find the pose of a photo in less than a minute, and we are convinced that this goal is achievable. While we are not entirely there yet, we are getting closer. This is our progress report.

April 3, 2008

One of the goals that I set when I first started writing on ActionsTalk is that 100 people would read the site in one day. Well finally, (a lot later than I thought) I reached that goal. On March 15th we had 132 unique visits to the site.

As you can see one day later there were 13 visitors, a 90% decrease in 24 hours. Sadly the 132 was a one day count hopefully with your help I can continue to write and post quality so that the number continues to grow.

Thanks for you help in achieving this small goal.

This is 3 parts creepy and 5 parts amazing. This video puts a robot project by Boston Dynamics on display. I can guarantee that you will be impressed by this. Most especially by the ability of this robot to correct its near fall on the ice (half way through video).

Again I apologize for all the videos recently but I’ve been watching more thus finding more amazing things to share.

18 minutes is all the time one is allowed to speak at TED. 18 minutes to give the best talk of their life. No pressure…

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader

The goal of TED is to spread ideas. The annual conference brings out the worlds most fascinating, motivating, inspiring, thinkers and doers. The talks range from how we will decrease the effect of global warming on the world, to how we should think about tomorrows web search technology. The speakers are activists, innovators, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, professors, CEO’s, artists, musicians, former vice presidents of the United States, founders of non-profs, and the list could go on!

TED include tons of their best talks online for free. The video’s stream quickly and are incredibly thought provoking. TED videos have cause me to experience a plethora of emotions. Everything from being inspired to move to Africa and give my life up for stopping African civil wars and promoting literacy, to being so pissed of at the speakers views I was yelling at my computer and shut down my machine. I love TED.

I was significantly behind the times in finding out about TED but since it has been made available to me I’ve used it as a strong source for through provoking education. If you watch TED or have gained as much as I have from it I encourage you to let us know!

The Nokia Research Center is working with the Cambriage Nanoscience Centre to develop nanoscience technologies that will bridge the latest and greatest in emerging technologies with the ability to benefit the end user. The idea behind this is (I know I say this a lot) absolutely market changing. This will change the word “product” forever. This technology allows the end user to combine many products in one. From watch, to clothing, to cell phone, to food tester, to health/bacteria scanner, and so on, this design/concept has the ability to do, it would seem, almost anything!

Here are some of the other many benefits of the technology:

• Newly-enabled flexible and transparent materials blend more seamlessly with the way we live
• Devices become self-cleaning and self-preserving
• Transparent electronics offering an entirely new aesthetic dimension
• Built-in solar absorption might charge a device, whilst batteries become smaller, longer lasting and faster to charge
• Integrated sensors might allow us to learn more about the environment around us, empowering us to make better choices

See some other pics.

This movie is a bit long but it will show (with drawings) some of the capabilities of these technology applied to products that will change the end-user (US!) ’s life. This will truly blow you away…

click to play

I apologize for the feeling that ActionsTalk has been very Gizmodo’esk’ but I’ve recently been super excited about new technologies that I’ve been exposed to. Enjoy.

In the “olden” days people read the (news)paper for their daily source of news, whether that was local, sports, business, or political news. Then things changed. People then watched television to gather their news. During that time politicians would focus large amounts of their campaign spending on television adverts. Again, things have changed. Now the internet has become an invaluable and essential tool for politicians to reach their supporters. Really anyone who is trying to reach the masses would be hard pressed to do so without the use of the internet. Without disclosing any political affiliation or allegiance I’m posting this video to show you how the internet has come to the forefront of modern political campaigns and to the forefront as a tool to reach people…to reach you.

Over 3.6 million people have watched this video online. Over 27,000 have left comments about the video and 50+ have left video responses. I’d say the internet has come into its own as a resource for anyone trying to reach the masses.

Go internet, you win!

Debt is a interesting thing. Ownership is a great thing.
Today I purchased my first car, a 2003 Nissan Pathfinder, and put myself in some serious debt. However, it doesn’t upset me at all. Even though I locked myself to “the man“ for roughly 60 months, ownership is awesome. Ownership gives you a sense of pride, accomplishment and appreciation for the ability to provide for yourself. I definitely look forward to the experience of buying a home, compared to the ownership of an automobile, those feelings must be enormous.

Check out the ride.

This video does a pretty good job of showing the rediculousness of the Web 2.0, Silicon Valley, craze…and the effects it can have on a 23 year olds wallet…which is nice.

watch video here.