A contented person with a whole heart, who has never doubted for a moment that she is loved by God and the universe, should not bother trying to succeed as a creative entrepreneur. She should get a job working for someone else, turn it off at 6:00 PM, and come home to the people who love her.
Only a restless, broken heart can drive you to do what is necessary.
And that’s how to succeed in business without really crying.
Read the entire thing here, it’s quick and dirty Zeldman
Now this is going to be a little difficult, so stay with me.
How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second you are carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff you have in your life and start with the little things the shelves, the drawers, the nicknacks: then start adding larger stuff, clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV – backpack should be getting pretty heavy now – and you go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home – I want you to stuff it all into that backpack.
Now i want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office, and then you move to the people that you trust with your most intimate secrets, your brothers and sisters, your children, parents, and finally your husband, wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend – and get ‘em into that backpack – feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake; your relationships are your heaviest components in your life. all those negotiations and arguments and secrets are compromising. The slower we move, the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live, symbiotically over a lifetime, star-crossed lovers, monogamous swans –
Ivan Jason Reitman did 4 short movies. He then directed Thank you for smoking (notably executive produced by Tech Entrepreneur David Sacks) and right after that Juno. Impressive for somebody born in ’77. His new masterpiece is called “up in the air“. The trailer is a thing of beauty. It’s such a perfect blend of an amazing underlying soundtrack, George Clooney’s Voice and staggering images. They could make you laugh, cry and shiver – all at once. Reitman is my personal Hollywood wunderkind (although originating from Canada).
The soundtrack comes from Textile Ranch/Charles Atlas and is called Genova
The nice people over at Help Remedies recently added a plethora of new drugs to their portfolio. When I first came across their products in 2008 I was impressed by the beauty of packaging design, especially in the realm of dead-ugly packages in the US pharmaceutical market. Help Remedies’ smart move is to get rid off all the “extra strenghts” in Helvetica ultra bold, but make it a nice experience to taking medication.
As an MD i miss seeing more of these in a professional-medical environment. Apart from being beautiful, packaging has another – not much talked about – functionality: Allowing physicians to distinguish between meds. There’s not a small amount of cases where Doctors or nurses misinterpret medication and patients get treated with the wrong drug, just because each pharmaceutical company spends a lot of money on how the packages should look like and how to make them “attractive” to doctors.
However, New York based Help remedies, is not intended to be on stock at hospitals (as far as I know) but their business model is a blend of distributing them to design hotels, online shop and B2B collaborations with various companies. I really like that idea and hope to hear from of them in future.
Also, have a closer look of those beautiful and indeed helpful pieces of medicine + art at PSFK
Seedcamp Week 2009 applications are now open for the next wave of European web-tech talent to apply
Seedcamp Week 2009 is a weeklong programme from 21-25th September that connects 20 early stage web tech startups with over 400 highly experienced and sought after entrepreneurs, investors, marketers, product and developer experts. The 20 teams do compete for seed funding, but most importantly, garner world-class connections and recognition in the European entrepreneurial ecosystem. At the end of the week Seedcamp will invest up to €50K each in 5 teams for a small equity stake (5%-10%).
Applications are now open and being accepted till August 23rd. More details are on our website (www.seedcamp.com) and blog (www.blog.seedcamp.com).
For the free tripwolf iPhone application we did a video. Props go to the great guys and girls at FH Salzburg and thanks to Freud for providing a great soundtrack. Check it out here and let me know what you think.
With the rise of twitter and various aggregators out there I thought it’s time to round up various services that try to build real time news services. You don’t have to be a seasoned media philosopher or journalist to see that both companies and people are shifting to some sort of a more real time and relevant news service. I am particularly interested in this topic since I co-founded a startup called all140.com – a real time news magazine from real people. Why real people? Because the service fetches data sources such as twitter and mashes them up with google search trends and others. This data basically comes from actual people. Not from biased journalists but a plethora of billions of opinions generating a sustainable news source.
As mentioned above I am working on this project and we aim to make the one-stop-shop for real time news. Design sucks I know, but quality is what counts.
Currently in everbody’s mouth and hyping it’s way through TechCrunch and the likes. The idea is simple and takes DIGG to another real-time-level, however it’s only based upon twitter.
You can already guess what it’s all about. A so-called Meme aggregating and semantically interpreting Tech News around the world. Not sure if twitter is involved as a source though.
A location specific Site aggregating twitter content corresponding to the location.
Conclusion: Flackr seems to be really good in terms of usability, however I am rather unsure how they plan to drive traffic to their site. TechMeme almost seems oldschool compared to the uber-realtime services and all140 is good but as soon as we have a better design it will be better.