Ryan A Graves.com

On December 9, 1914, disaster struck the laboratories and factories of inventor Thomas Edison. Great geysers of green flame, fueled by chemicals, shot into the air, and the fire departments of eight nearby towns rushed to the scene. Numerous fire fighters and volunteers were overcome, and one Edison worker was killed. Edison’s son, Charles, was overwhelmed by the horror of the scene; but the old man walked into the yard, his hands folded across his chest, and watched, saying only, “Where’s Mother? Get her over here, and her friends, too. They’ll never see a fire like this again.”Many people sent messages of condolence and support. To one such sympathizer, Edison replied, “I am sixty-seven; but I’m not too old to make a fresh start.” Within three weeks, the Edison factories were restored to some semblance of order; and by New Year’s Day, they were running at two shifts. The speed of the recovery, said one observer, was almost as spectacular as the disaster.

Don’t quit. Don’t panic. Don’t give up. Press on and be a finisher. Do the work God has called you to do, and see what happens when you reach for the things that are ahead.
Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
Thomas Edison

This is a pretty cool site that lets you search a persons Seesmic videos visually using the thumbnails that are created for each video. As you can see from the screen shot it is not that useful for finding a specific video because really it just becomes a collage of thumbnails of the same persons face. But I thought it would be worth pointing out the new ways that people are using Seesmic to create rich interfaces for video and video blogging on the web . This was created by Ben Metcalf aka: dot.Ben.

Check it out and search your user name here.

As more and more of my projects move online I find myself worrying about web strategy more and more. As a “blogger” (I hate that name) who is becoming more transparent to the world everyday, “personal brand strategy” is very important. Karen O’Brien writes a web strategy blog and in this post explains how web strategy is becoming very segmented. Karen identifies the segments much better than I could so I’ll let her tell you….check out her post.

Yesterday Gary and Kevin were together in Vegas and took an hour or so just to answer questions people had on Seesmic. A few notes on this:

• Seesmic is obviously sweet and is going to last. The big names are buying in.
• Kevin and Gary combined have phenomenal insights into building web companies and communities.
• I’m pissed I caught this late and didn’t ask a question.

I watched most of the question and answers and chose to post this one because of its relevance to start-ups. However, many questions were totally random and I loved that. One question was about how to sneak out of the house!? This question is about how to bring more people to a company as it relates to employees and as it relates to funding. Here is Kevin and Gary’s answer.

These guys are awesome. Look soon for my review of Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book: 101 Wines Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World.

I once again feel obligated to apologize for my post bashing the Twitter faithfuls. It is truly an awesome and affective web app! I am now fully on board and would encourage any of you who are not yet sold to try it again. It took me two tries to see how useful the tool could be. I’ve met some awesome people on Twitter and have had some great conversations with existing friends via Twitter.

The next step at least in my head is, how I or others can use Twitter in the workplace? How can Twitter contribute to Enterprise 2.0? Well, Tara Hunt author of horsepigcow.com tells you just how companies can make good use of tweets in the professional environment. Twitter is legit, jump on or get left behind!

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!

This start-up is attempting to combine a social network of “start-uppers” and a nifty little AI tool that will predict the probability of success of a start-up. The community side is to fill in gaps for new companies. Example: you need a PM, graphic designer, lawyer? might help you do it. This is something that a site like LinkedIn does not offer. Great idea! However, there are a million other social networks for this crowd, so they’ve decided to differentiate themselves by adding this start-up success predictor to spice up their offering a bit.

YouNoodle | Welcome to YouNoodle! via kwout

It could work…I can’t see this tool being that accurate but I don’t think that matters much. It seems to me that the success of You Noodle will not be determined by the accuracy of the “success predictor” but more by the amount of people and start-ups that sign-up for and use the social network.

Also, the team behind YouNoodle is pretty impressive. These bio’s are from their about page.

______________________________________

Bob Goodson, CEO, Cofounder (27) - British
Bob was studying for the MPhil Medieval English Literature at Oxford before being head-hunted to the U.S. by Max Levchin. He was one of the first employees at Yelp.com before starting YouNoodle. Chinese acrobatics is the latest pursuit.

Kirill Makharinsky, Business Development and Data Analytics, Cofounder (22) - Russian, British
Real World Magazine’s ‘UK Graduate of the Year 2006′, Kirill finished Oxford with a Mathematics degree and then worked on data and analytics at Slide.com before starting YouNoodle. He’s seriously into tennis, heli-skiing, piano and making sense of huge data sets.

Rebeca Hwang, Network Strategy and Development, (28) - Korean, Argentinean
Rebeca is a Chemistry and Physics Olympiad Medalist of Argentina, has 3 patents, donated to NGOs, and had a full Scholarship to MIT. She is a PhD candidate at Stanford on Social Network Theory, and is into rugby and white water rafting.

Joachim Krebs, Engineer (21) - Danish
Joachim was recruited by legendary game-developer Sir Peter Molyneux at 16.

Sam Purtill, Engineer (19) - American
Sam is a young entrepreneur and web engineer. Deferred university place to join YN. At 16, became a partner in the Romanian-based design studio, Okapi Studio (http://okapistudio.com).

______________________________________

These are some pretty impressive bio’s and I’d guess that if this start-up predicting social network does tank they’ll find something else that doesn’t. I’ll look to this group for something real big.

Yesterday I had an opportunity to speak with Gary Reiner, CIO of General Electric and ask him anything that I wanted. It was part of my new gig in a GE leadership training program. I don’t discuss my job here on ActionsTalk but this experience and opportunity forced me to break that rule. Here are my notes from the talk with Gary:

When asked about IT’s contribution to the business, Reiner replied…IT not a contributor or service for the business, IT is the business, fully integrated. Any project that is taken on will fail if it is considered an IT project. A project should only be undertaken if it will improve the business and improve a process that the business executes. These process improvement project will succeed. Along those lines he expanded that the best measure of a process is “cycle time”.

When asked about Open Source products Reiner was very enthusiastic. He was heavily in favor and a current user of products like Skype and OpenOffice. He would even like to incorporate them into the worlds largest company if it wasn’t for issues like security, transition difficulties, and vendor support, all of which are major concerns.

There were other topics discussed that would not be appropriate for me to share on this forum. A few of these topics discussed were emerging new technologies and the companies that are developing these technologies and also many other GE specific topics.

Gary Reiner was incredibly approachable, inquisitive, broad in his knowledge of GE and the world economy and genuinely interested in what we (as low level developing managers) had to contribute. Having an opportunity to speak with Gary was an exceptional experience!

Forbes.com release its second annual top 25 Web celebs recently and the list is interesting. Although I would consider myself pretty knowledgeable as far as what is going on on the web with start-ups and other Web 2.0 topics there are some bloggers and other web celebs in this list that I wasn’t familiar with. There are the obvious, Michael Arrington, Matt Drudge, and sadly, Perez Hilton, but others are not as obvious.

Here’s the list. Read them over make your judgements and let us know what you think.

The Web Celeb 25

1. Perez Hilton
2. Michael Arrington
3. Mark Frauenfelder
4. Seth Godin
5. Cory Doctorow

check out the rest here…

lanjut →

Not that I want this to happen any time soon, but I’ve been thinking about kids, having them, and the effect they have on ones life. Joy, challenge, and the deepest possible satisfaction a human can feel are the effects that I’ve come up with.  Having kids allows one to be 100% selfless and I think that selflessness is the only “real” way to find happiness.

Kids put a smile on my face almost all the time.  Sometimes you just want to smack them for running down the aisle of an airplane or crying on the flight, but most of the time they are care-free, curious, full of smiles and truly joyful.

That’s something that I’ll definitely be interested in…someday.

Bringing a child into this world is hands down the best contribution one can have on the world, provided they dedicate themselves to raising the child properly; showing love, compassion and sacrifice for the child. Nothing a person does can have a longer lasting impact on this world. Having a child can potentially have an infinite impact lasting generations  and generations to come. There are many reason people have children, the contribution to man-kind is just one of them.

When I’m ready (not today or any day soon) I’ll will be so pumped to have kids.