Jobster’s CEO Jason Goldberg sent me this vid this morning of their marketing team brainstorming the launch of their new Facebook application.
I’m curious what your thoughts are on the brainstorming process and the ideas they’re throwing around.
Full disclosure: I worked for Jobster and left about 1 year ago. I also sold a previous business, WorkZoo.com to Jobster.
When I arrived in the US of A in 2003 I got into coffee in a big way. It took me a while to get it right. When I moved to Seattle from CA I discovered Peets coffee. They don’t keep any beans in-store for longer than 10 days so it’s incredibly fresh. You’ll notice when you grind Peets beans, none of the ground coffee sticks to the grinder. Try the same with Starbucks beans and it’s a mess. I don’t know what that means, all I know is that there’s a correlation between that effect, fresh beans and great tasting coffee.
There’s another outfit (in case you thought this was a Peets viral marketing trick) called CoffeeFool.com. I spotted them on my Gmail ads the other day. They claim to have very fresh beans – I haven’t tried them yet.
So here’s my recipe.
Ingredients:
1 French Press
1 Pound Peet’s Sumatra whole beans (bought from a Peets outlet because they have very fresh beans)
1 high speed coffee grinder
3 Quarts filtered water
1 Thick ceramic coffee cup
Fresh heavy whipping cream
Sugar to taste
Method:
Boil the water in a stove top kettle.
Grind the beans while you wait – use a 10 second medium grind. I don’t measure my beans using a spoon – I simply cover the blades of the grinder. Don’t pour the ground beans into the french press yet.
Once the water has boiled, fill the coffee cup with boiling water and let it stand.
Fill the french press with boiling water WITHOUT the beans.
Let the french press stand for 10 seconds.
Empty the boiling water from the french press, pour the ground beans in from the grinder and fill with enough water for 1 cup.
Stir the ground beans into the water until completely covered with water.
Push the press down immediately because if you covered the blades of the grinder, that’s quite a lot of coffee for 1 person. You’ll get all the oils without any bitterness this way.
Throw out the boiling water in your ceramic cup, pour in 1/2 inch of heavy whipping cream and fill with coffee from the french press.
Add sugar to taste.
Enjoy!
Dave Lu, CEO of FanPop.com was part of a panel at the Churchill club recently – a previous entry has the video. I loved an analogy he made: That the leap of faith you take as an entrepreneur is a lot like a scene from Indiana Jones. Here’s the scene:
I love what he does at the end of the clip – I’m sure there’s a metaphor there somewhere.
A friend in the UK sent me this. The number of searches for ‘facebook’ in the UK as just overtaken the number of searches for ‘myspace’. This has a history of being an excellent predictor and it’s showing that myspace is going to get beaten up by Facebook – at least in the UK market.
I found this awesome vid on Guy Kawasaki’s blog. It’s a panel session with Markus Frind, Founder, PlentyofFish.com
and James Hong, Co-Founder, HotorNot.com and a few others. Markus Frind is my personal hero and much of the reason I have an aversion to VC money.
This is more than an hour long, so when you’re done working tonight at 2am, crack a beer and enjoy this:
Someone emailed me this morning and in his email sig he has a derivative of what was supposedly an ad by Ernest Shackleton for his 1908 Nimrod Antarctic expedition:
I was intrigued, did a little googling and discovered that the ad seems to be a fake and the first published appearance of the “Men wanted for hazardous journey” ad is in a 1948 book by Julian Watkins “The 100 Greatest Advertisements” – published 40 years after the actual expedition.
Funny how this surfaced recently and Watkins never caught any flak for it in 1948. I’m curious what other literary murder authors got away with back then before information was set free.
I’m at open coffee this morning at Lousa’s Coffee shop in Seattle – here early to get some reading in. Come down if you’re free this morning. There’s going to be an awesome group of entrepreneurs and innovators here from 8:30 until everyone leaves (usually after 10:30).
I’ll often find myself chatting about choice of technology with fellow entrepreneurs and invariably it’s assumed the new web app is going to be developed in Rails.
I don’t know enough about Rails to judge it’s worth. I do know that you can develop applications in Rails very quickly and that it scales complexity better than Perl. Rails may have problems scaling performance. I also know that you can’t hire a Rails developer in Seattle for love or money.
So here are some things to think about when choosing a programming language and platform for your next consumer web business. They are in chronological order – the order you’re going to encounter each issue:
If you answered yes to all 5 of these, then you’ve made the right choice.
I use Perl for my projects, and it does fairly well on most criteria. It’s weakest is scaling to handle complexity. Perl lets you invent your own style of coding, so it can become very hard to read someone else’s code. Usually that’s solved through coding by convention. Damian Conway’s Object Oriented Perl is the bible of Perl convention in case you’re considering going that route.
“You don’t write because you want to say something: you write because you’ve got something to say.”
Next time I’ll have something to say.