Your technology is brilliant. You do exactly what I’ve longed for, and so gracefully. But your DRM and subscription model are more limiting than iTunes and more ill conceived than the Zune. Oh Amazon Kindle, why must you tantalize me so?

My book clubs and Amazon Prime addiction lead me to buying altogether too many books to find a place on the shelf. I hate having to decide which reading I can comfortably carry on the Metro or a plane. My laptop is too bulky for a lot of activities. And I’ve long complained that I’ve needed a higher resolution electronic screen than my laptop’s for reading.

But you want to charge me money for my RSS? For my Washington Post access? To read a PDF? Why can’t I just ‘sync up’ like I do with all the rest of my electronics? I’d rather pay for EVDO access than get taxed to download blogs.

I’m spellbound by the ability to download books in mere seconds, to full-text search (say, the names of characters), to mark up pages and highlight. It was a caring touch to add free Wikipedia access. And the display, while perhaps not the most attractive of consumer electronics, seems easy on the eyes, light, and functional.

I’m going to wait on the Kindle experiencefor now.

I’m curious to see how people get around some of the Kindle’s difficulties synchronizing. A tool that could seamlessly export RSS feeds from into organized HTML file tree would alleviate many of the fees and take some of the sting out of the process. Or better yet, maybe hackers will find a way around the EVDO limitations and open it up for better browsing or content synchronization–after all, it’s a practical piece of hardware that could benefit from some software tweaking.

I’m curious how this will play out in the coming months. Perhaps I’ll jump on the bandwagon in due time, but in the mean time I’ll just enjoy watching Amazon get a little bad press on their DRM for a change… They’ve done such a good job for a long time, and they continue to here, but this time the price and terms are just a bit frustrating.

Well, there’s finally some coverage. DC Startup Weekend and the web 2.0 startups were mentioned in Monday’s paper (The Washington Post)!

• DC Startup Weekend
• Web 2.0 Startups in the DC area
• Photos from Startup Weekend (hey, I made it into two!)

Thank you to Kendra Marr and Zachary Goldfarb for taking the time to talk to so many of us and offer a small glimpse into a community that’s thriving and energetic.

My only hope was that they might make it easier for people to latch onto some of the groups and join in–so here’s a quick mention of a places to look if you happen to be coming here from the Post:

• DC’s tech discussion forum–The DC Technology Network
• The main list of DC area events going on this week–DC Tech Events Weekly
• Some geeky stuff for non-profit people–NetSquared
• The group that gets and deserves credit for having the biggest events and starting the longest ago (well, at least so far as the new groups)–Refresh DC

My guess is that there’ll be some more technology press soon, given the New New Internet Conference on Thursday in Reston. But either way, hat’s off to so many fantastic organizers for really bringing vibrancy and stability to a community that was just dying to get started.

DC Startup Weekend is almost over, but our launch is just underway. Over seventy passionate and talented people have come to one place to build a web application and a business over the course of fifty-four hours. That web application, which we had never even discussed or planned to work on prior, became HolaNeighbor.

Update, my photos are now up on Flickr.

We voted on an idea. We composed a business plan, architected a user experience, designed a beautiful website, developed a very-involved web application…and put it all together. Many of us didn’t know anyone, but after a little bit of a rocky start, the chemistry, cohesion, and excitement of our product launch paralleled that of any other. Maybe we rushed a little, but that was par for the course.

I’ve always felt the best way to meet people is in a setting where you can really offer your best, so they can learn what you bring to the table while contributing to something meaningful. Startup Weekend accomplished that, and accelerated the process of building some great relationships.If you’re curious about HolaNeighbor, Continue reading…

Argument 1,297 why you need to let go of control and delegate, outsource, and do the things you should…

Don’t dream about how you yourself are going to change the world–that’s naive and way too difficult. You may very well leave your mark, but if you want it to be a large or lasting one it’s going to have to involve others. And the first step to involving others is the hardest one–recognizing that you are not special.

Thomas Friedmann captured the essence of this in The World is Flat when he quipped that “in China, when you are one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.” While you may not feel it reading the headlines in the Post, there are a lot of brilliant folks who know how to get things done just as well you. Accept that.

Step 2: Continue reading…

My head is spinning from all the excitement in the DC technology community. Over 90 people at an event on widgets this week? WTF!? nextDC, Refresh DC, Social Media Club, DC Bloggers, NoVA Open Coffee, NetSquared, Tech Tuesday, Lunch 2.0 (fyi, this is a random selection, and probably not accurate or complete)…and those are just the ones that want to meet monthly. The only thing to be sure of from all this: there’s a lot of Type A geeks inside the Beltway. But how will all this evolve into something sustainable, vibrant, more diverse, and larger than the sum of a few energetic parts?

I’ve spent the last five years networking with people who think online communities were invented in the last five months. My clients are primarily MBA & lawyer types, and my friends are mostly save-the-world liberal arts people. But every day I’d go through the geeky & design-y podcasts and RSS feeds, dreaming about the west coast. So I thought of starting a technology group in DC because I knew there would be people with similar passions. I purchased the domain silicondc.com and did what any entrepreneur would do: market research. That’s what led me to the cacophony of DC technology groups above. Needless to say, DC no longer needs me to bring people together to talk tech.

What the latest round of DC technology needs is a vision. Continue reading…

Some times there’s just the right confluence of factors for a perfect week. That was last week for me–at the twentieth annual Consultants’ Camp in Mt. Crested Butte, Colorado. This was my first year in attendance and it will most certainly not be the last.

Continue reading…

Rarely are design problems just about design–and it’s a challenge getting clients to understand that. At the 2007 User Experience Week after party, Doug LeMoine and I had a long discussion about how clients don’t see the functional/engineering/technical components involved in making something “attractive.” While my company is solving design problems on a much smaller scale than his (Doug’s the Director of Design Communication at Cooper), it’s clear to me that this is a systemic misunderstanding throughout the business community.

For just over a year I’ve been lucky enough to have an incredible graphic designer working with me, and that’s led our company to be solicited as much for design as for development and training. Quite frequently we’re asked to “give a facelift” to some Excel report, PowerPoint template, or Word proposal. But while aesthetics may be what they’d like at the end of the day, there are a number of steps to getting there. Giving the client what they want in a design requires helping them to understand what they really need.

Let’s take an Excel project we’ve recently completed. The client sought to illustrate to their prospects the advantages and disadvantages of various employee benefits packages. Their existing report creation process was as follows:

1. Take data from a number of places and paste it into various cells and formulas throughout an existing Excel workbook
2. Edit a few formulas to address some of the variations in this new set of data
3. Edit the source range of the Excel charts and graphs to the newly pasted data so as to fit it within an appropriate range
4. Reposition the graphs as Excel often moved them around in the process of updating
5. Print or email the reports to clients

The existing process required deep knowledge of what the input data meant, of how Excel formulas worked, of how the final design should look, and of how a mistake in the reports might appear (manual processes like these rarely work on the first try). In short, it required a lot of expertise and a few hours worth of time.

Could we improve the attractiveness of their reports? Sure. Would that design hold up as their data shifted? Not so fast… Continue reading…

Since I’ve actually been on top of things lately when it comes to work, I’ve thought a lot about what’s the best use of my time. I have no trouble finding “things to do,” but when I don’t have a critical deadline looming there are many options…and paying bills or processing digital camera pictures isn’t the answer. Heck, I’ve already cleared my inbox. So what next?

My list is likely to be very different than yours, as it comes from the perspective of the technology company businessowner. Still, as I put out later in this article, you ought to know at least what your #1 is. Here’s my list:

1. Get billable work for employees to do
2. Make a tangible step toward your product ideas
3. Do something billable
4. Build reputation or strategize to help with 1,2, or 3
5. If you’re not doing 1-4, find someone or a technology to perform this task in the future

The point of this list is that my business needs to make money, but I shouldn’t be one of the primary revenue-producers. Rainmaker? For now. Worker-bee? No, thank you Continue reading…

Yesterday was DC’s first BarCamp, and I hope it can set the tone for what’s to come in the DC technology community. Unlike the more business-oriented groups like NVTC, GBTC, DC Tech, and MD Hi-Tech, this was by tech people and for tech people. There were noticeable lacks of business topics, VC & legal attendees, and explanations of acronyms. It was beautiful.

The conference was organized by a team of volunteers and paid for by numerous sponsors. Fleishman-Hillard Inc. was kind of enough to donate their office space. There were no set topics, but the 110 attendees presented on 27 hot issues (with varying degrees of preparation). The topics ranged from user experience to Second Life to Getting Things Done. But more important than the details of the content was the energy of the attendees.

Not since the heyday of Netpreneur have there been so many people in one DC room so excited about what’s happening online. This was evidenced by the high level of conversation, the community-willingness to share, and the pure geekery of the attendees (everywhere I turned were MacBooks, iPhones, live bloggers, and people uploading photos to Flickr).

I can’t thank the organizers (Justin Thorp, Jason Garber, M. Jackson Wilkinson, Rodney Degracia, Martin Ringlein, Peter Corbett, Nick O’Neill, and Justin Stockton) enough for the time they so graciously volunteered. Without question this and the upcoming DC Startup Weekend will lead to more technology businesses, higher quality applications being developed, and many new friendships.

You can read some other good conversation about BarCamp at Russell Heimlich’s blog, the Viget Blog, and many other sites. And you can find hundreds of pictures on flickr. See you all next year!

tag: BarCampDC

When I started SET, everyone was a prospect and most people were intimidating. But to truly succeed, you have to accept that few are good prospects and you can’t allow good prospects to intimidate. That’s okay, the way you perceive yourself and money change a LOT after being in business for a few years. Taking that to heart is what will help you to convert good prospects into great business.

When I got started at my business, I’d never sat at a bar, let alone “networked.” All these suits seemed to know what they were talking about–they were leagues above me. Over the next few years two things changed–I developed a formidable business and gained the confidence to see myself as an equal. Truthfully though, one really only needs the latter. Confidence and being personable are more important than “actual success” when you’re clinking beers. And I’m not trying to be sly, it’s just that there isn’t and never can be a real measure for success–while being a politician or exec at Verizon may place you in control of money and influence, they’re positions to which I neither envy nor aspire. Success is what you want to make of it.

Which brings me to the second part: money. I came to business soon after college, at a time when I respected money in a very different way than most businesspeople: everything was too expensive for me and the value of the dollar was quite high. However, I learned quickly that $50/hour was not exorbitant when you were only billing two hours per week. I remember the first time I had a “4-digit project”–who would’ve thought I’d be fighting for 6-digit projects just a few years later?

Which brings me to the point of this article: there’s nothing to stop you from winning a dream project. Continue reading…